By Katharine Mieszkowski: Sometime this summer Google News will be recast in an upgraded form called Flipper, according to TechCrunch. The concept behind the cutesy name is that you can easily flip the pages to get to what you want.
From looking at a screenshot it appears that on Flipper you'll be able to browse by sources and keywords, as well as "most viewed" and "recommended." Yet, over at the Business Insider, looking at the same screenshot, Nicholas Carlson writes: "Right now, Google News doesn't actually host news content -- just links. But Flipper seems to pull in full articles from news sites. Won't that get Google in even more trouble with newspapers who already think the search engine steals their content?"
The search giant has tangled with newspaper execs in the past over whether the site's use of headlines and short excerpts constitutes "fair use" of the material under copyright law. Any publisher can opt out of being searchable by Google or featured in Google News, but doing so would mean giving up a firehose of traffic.
Last May in an interview with the Financial Times, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, quashed hopes that the search giant would buy a struggling newspaper, or use its charitable arm to help out papers seeking non-profit status.
We can't wait to see if Flipper makes newspaper execs flip out.
mandalp1
Richard Davis
Chris Rywalt
Blue Roses
whitenoise
Anupum Mehrotra
Salon.com
Comments
One is that by showing images of full pages instead of links, the service might show far fewer links and articles on the front page. This would reduce its quality as a news hub, I believe. It would also have the effect of concentrating web traffic among more popular or widely known sources, leading to an unfortunate homogenizing effect that could harm news quality more broadly.
The second is that if Nicholas Carlson is right, and Flipper imports entire news articles, it would prevent web traffic from traveling to those pages, where the host publication would have an array of additional content they would like readers to stumble across. Aside from the fact that taking full articles this way without paying a licensing or royalty fee would be very much a copyright infringement, Google would be using publishers' content to undermine the publishers' flow of web traffic.
That's just not sound business practice for a search engine, in the long run, whose central role is to connect searchers with sources.
It would also homogenize and reduce the niche-reaching capacity of Google's web-wide ad service, by undercutting the sustainable traffic that sites hosting Google ads rely on. While this might seem like a way for Google to capitalize more freely on their own ad platform, the homogenization problem will reduce overall revenue from the ads by braking click-through rates.
http://www.flypmedia.com/issues/31/#10/2
The New Yorker does this too. I loathe it. It's clumsy, high bandwidth, form over function.
Aside from that, here comes the future.
As I've said often, if the gods had wanted us to use computers, they wouldn't have given us paper and pencils.