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Screenshot of the Fast Flip homepage
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Type of site | News |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | |
| Created by | |
| URL | fastflip.googlelabs.com |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Not required |
| Launched | 14 September 2009[1] |
| Current status | Discontinued |
Google Fast Flip was an online news aggregator from Google Inc. that mimicked the experience of flicking through a newspaper or magazine, allowing visual search of stories in manner similar to microfiche.[2][3][4] It was launched in betabyGoogle Labs at the TechCrunch 50 conference in September 2009.[5][6][7]
The site presented images of stories from Google's news partners, which could be clicked on to navigate to the story on the news provider's own website.[7] Stories could be scrolled between using the mouse or cursor keys. The presentation of stories used a similar algorithm to Google News, but stories could be ordered by publication as well as by subject.[6] Krishna Bharat of Google News has said that "Fast Flip is mostly for longer shelf-life content, the kind of content you want to recommend to other people."[8] Fast Flip was created after Larry Page "asked why the web was not more like a magazine, allowing users to flip from screen to screen seamlessly."[4] Fast Flip was available as well on iPhone and Android mobile devices.[9]
Users of Fast Flip were able to follow friends and topics, find new content, and to create their own customized magazines around their searches.[10]
At launch, there were 39 mainly US-based news partners. Google said that it would share the majority of revenue from contextual adverts with its news partners.[7][8][11]
Fast Flip was praised for allowing visual,[12] fast[13] and serendipitous[14] browsing of news stories, but it has been criticized as being a novelty,[15] anachronistic, as it emulates print media,[16] limits navigation and presents few news sources,[17] and as being more focused on the needs of publishers than of readers.[18][19][20] Its visual search has been compared to the beta visual search of Microsoft Bing[2][16][21] and to The Onion's microfiche iPhone app.[22] Fast Flip has also been cited as a demonstration of Google's power in the news marketplace; by setting up another news interface that uses publishers' content without returning much value.[23]
In September 2011, Google announced it would discontinue a number of its products, including Google Fast Flip.[24]
