Google Labs has started a new service called Fast Flip. Many publishers and content owners will not be thrilled because clicking on a news article keeps the user within Google News. Screenshots of other websites appear on the frame in the left. The Fast Flip homepage has screenshots of recent and popular news articles.

However a large share of publishers agreed Google News to use their logos and images as part of the new user interface. Fast Flip is mobile-friendly too. Google will even share the revenue of contextual advertising with the selected publishers. This is the first time that Google will be sharing revenue for news content.

Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News, described Fast Flip as “a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles.”

Google News has gotten a makeover where a featured photo, images, and popular stories have become the center of attention.  When clicking on the link below news stories that say “all xxxx news articles,” you are redirected to a page that has all the articles related to the original story and features photos and videos on the side.  At the bottom of that page is a link to relevant blogs too.  This is great for bloggers because now their content doesn’t necessarily have to be just on Google Blog Search.

Google News uses an algorithm to collect all relevant stories.  This algorithm has been the subject of controversy when dealing with The Associated Press.

TechCrunch gave the new Google News interface a negative review, but I believe the changes applied are quite beneficial.  The images and videos provide more clarity on what the news articles are about and it levels the playing field between news agencies and bloggers.

[via Google News Blog]

“They will not get our copy going forward,” stated Associated Press CEO Tom Curley.

Tom Curley wants Google to strike a proper deal with the Associated Press going forward otherwise they plan to cut off the search engine company from their articles.  These remarks may be a follow-up to legal actions that William Dean Singleton mentioned earlier.

The company said that they are planning to create landing pages that redirect users away from secondary sources that post original content from the Associated Press.

The Associated Press is owned by several news organizations.  The Associated Press is paid undisclosed sums of money from Google for spreading their content across Google News.  However many other blogs and news websites simply steal content from the A.P. and spread it on their website which can be found on Google News itself too.

[via Forbes]

Chuck Rosenberg, Andy Hertzfeld, and Michael Cohen have discussed the new features that are coming out of Google Labs this week.  Google Labs is a place where Google employees can design, research, and brainstorm ideas for the company to launch as part of the 20% free time at the company.  Out of Google Labs, ideas such as Google Maps, iGoogle, and Google News has been introduced.  The two newest services to arrive in Google Labs are Similar Images and Google News Timeline.

Similar Images is a feature where Google Images uses a visual similarity engine to find images that are related to each other.  The reasoning behind creating this feature is to solve the problem of finding the right image if you can’t describe it in words.

Google News Timeline chronologically organizes results on Google News.  Users can navigate the news by using the time scale on days, weeks, years, months, years, or decades.

In order to keep up with all of the ideas that Google engineers are coming up with, the company launched Googlelabs.com.  The new website also centralizes all of the Labs information that relate to GMail, Google News, Google Office, Google Code, etc.

The Associated Press and their subsidiaries will now begin taking legal action against websites that aggregate their content without permission. One of the clear aggregate suspects is Google News.

“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” stated William Dean Singleton, Chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group and a board of director on the AP. The AP will develop a system that will track articles online to see if they are being used legally.

The statement that was made by the AP did not specifically mention any of the companies that they are taking a stand against.

Google News shows the headlines and a couple of sentences of the article in the title, but anyone that wants to read the whole article has to click through the website. Google has argued that this limited use does not require permission.

The AP itself has an agreement with Google for their content to appear on Google News, but many other newspaper companies do not. This action is more of a “newspaper industry initiative” that is being led by the AP. Over 1,400 United States member newspaper owns the AP collectively.

The AP has about 4,100 employees and made about $710 million in revenue in 2007. In late February, Google started placing advertisements on their News website.

[via NYT]

Yesterday Google announced that they will be placing ads on Google News’ search results in the U.S.  This means if you search for keywords such as the iPhone or the Kindle, you will notice results for sponsored links from websites such as BlackBerry.com, att.com, Amazon.com, and SonyStyle.com.

“We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we’ll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too,” stated Josh Cohen on the Google News Blog.

Google was debating whether to put ads on news.google.com for about 6 years.  They were skeptical before because of criticism from newspaper publishers.  Content from Google News is aggregated from various blogs and online newspapers.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has reiterated that the search engine company is a friend of newspaper publishers.  Google’s own Adwords and AdSense business depends on newspaper publishers and other content publishers.

“When Eric Schmidt says he worries about the newspaper industry, it’s crocodile tears,” stated Brian Tierney CEO of the parent company for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News.

William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group has a difference of opinion with Tierney.  MediaNews is the parent company of about 54 daily newspapers including the San Jose Mercury NEws and The Denver Post.  He says that newspaper companies don’t have to let Google take content, but opt to do so because it drives traffic.

Reuters says that they will be watching Google News closely as they don’t have any licensing agreement with them.  “We are certainly not surprised by the move, which places Google News in a position to compete with news publishers — giving us cause for concern,” stated Alisa Bowen, SVP for Reuters.

[via New York Times]