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Walk-through: Google Fast Flip Brings 'Magazine' Metaphor to News Browsing

Google's news reader uses static page images to display news articles instantly. Whether it's really a faster way to read news is open to debate. Here's a short guided tour of the new approach.

Mark Sullivan, PC World

Google Fast Flip: Some Back Story 1 of 9

Monday at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco Google announced a new news reader, Fast Flip, that tries to make online news browsing feel more like flipping through a magazine . OK, but why? The back story, according to Google Search Products VP Marissa Mayer, is this: Some months ago Google founder Larry Page asked why you can't shuffle through Web news articles as quickly as you can articles in a paper magazine. If news pages loaded really, really fast, people might read more news, and see more ads around the news, or so the thinking goes. So three Google News engineers set out to make a news reader that pre-loads images of news article pages, instead of loading the actual web pages containing the articles.

The result is Google Fast Flip. The following slides should give you a feel for how Google Fast Flip works.

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