Google, long seen as an enemy by many in the news industry, is making a bold attempt to be seen as its friend with a new service it hopes will make it easier for readers to view newspaper and magazine articles.
On Monday, the company unveiled an experimental news hub called Fast Flip that allows users to view news stories from dozens of major publishers and flip through them as fast as they would the pages of a magazine.
Fast Flip, which is based on Google News, attempts to address what Google considers a major problem with news sites: because they often are slow to load, they turn off many readers. Google, the leader in Web search services and advertising, has long argued that if reading news online resembled more closely the experience of perusing physical newspapers or magazines, people would read more.
“Browsing news on the Web is much slower than it is in print,” said Krishna Bharat, a distinguished researcher at Google who developed Google News in 2002. “When it is fast, people will look at more news and more ads, and that’s something that publishers want to see.”