Quick on the heels of Bing (which launched a visual search engine based on images), Google released a new tool yesterday, Google Fast Flip, in hopes of recreating the print reading experience online.
The visual-search experiment lets readers “flip” through newspaper and magazine Web pages that are sorted according to the most viewed and recent stories as well as recommended articles and headlines. Readers can also sift through pages by a particular news organization or magazine and peruse articles by topic of interest.
Google launched Fast Flip in hopes of generating a new revenue model for the struggling publishing industry and to encourage more people to read news content online.
One of the main complaints about reading news online “is that browsing can be really slow,” Krishna Bharat, a “Distinguished Researcher” for Google News, wrote in The Official Google Blog. “A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!”
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