So while Microsoft is busy giving us a new Visual way of searching, Google for its part is busy tinkering with Google News. Announced just now via the Official Google Blog is Fast Flip, a new feature in Google Labs that lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers.
Fast Flip lets you flip through online news content fast to help you find interesting news that you would like to read. In addition, Fast Flip keeps track of your reading habits and use them to give you sources, topics and journalists that you may like based on your previous use of FastFlip.
Fast Flip also brings with it some socialization features such as sharing news items via email and a tab for “liking” a news item. If you’re familiar with Google Book Preview, Fast Flip seems to use the same technology when browsing book content.
The new feature is currently available in Google Labs and accessible from http://fastflip.googlelabs.com. Initial contents in Fast Flip were supplied by various Google News Content partners including NYT, the Atlantic, the Washington Post and other top newspaper publishers. Google will share ad revenues generated from Fast Flip to these content publishers.
With Fast Flip, Google is hoping to help the challenges faced by the newspaper publishing industry. Fast Flip is also available for the iPhone and Android devices.
