Is Google Fast Flip the new ‘newspaper’?

By Charles-Henry Ruyant

This monday Google unveiled Fast Flip. Fast Flip is th new way of viewing the Google News results page. 

This innovation  will show you all the news pages relevant to a subject in a graphic version, more or less like Google Image results page. When you click on one page, you can read it like a newspaper and switch to the next results page via some links on the side. It is sort of like a news paper about one subject.

Fast Flip - Google

Fast Flip - Google

This new way of viewing the news is very impressive and easy to use.

The only bad thing about it is the limited number of sources available (although the BBC, FT and many others can be published on Google). We still don’t have all the sources like in the actual Google News.

Good innovations, but needs to cover more media…

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Google News Timeline

By Charles-Henry Ruyant

Google launches News Timeline in this lab section. Google News Timeline organises your search results chronologically. This tool allows us to see news, video, magazines etc chronologically by year, month, week and day.

 

If you want to know what kind of books or movies are out on your birthday you just have to enter the date and Google do the rest (date in US format).

 

This Google tool is very fast and well presented. Google News Timeline allows the user to look for a specific category, date or topic (via keywords).

 

Google News Timeline

Google News Timeline

 

Generally this tool is great, but the further we go back in the past (e.g. :20 years), the less sources we find (mostly Wikipedia, Time magazine and some baseball news). Also, I am not sure what additional value this tool provides compared to BBC Archive or The Times Archive.

 

Time Archive

Time Archive

 

At the end of the day Google News Timeline uses these different sources (the Times, BBC etc…) and compiles them by date.

 

In conclusion, it is a good tool but not unique. I don’t see a big need for Google News Timeline.

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