Google continues Fast Flip development

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Google will continue to develop its Fast Flip service but has no immediate plans to bring it out of the testing phase.

The search engine has not ruled out new advertising options for publishers using the service, which launched in September 2009 as a way to search for news items and articles, but with images of webpages returned as results. Publishers including the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, New York Times and the Washington Post have signed up to the service, which directs readers back to the original source of the article. According to reports from Italian newspaper la Repubblica , Google is planning to allow publishers using Fast Flip, which is currently only available on the English-language version of Google News, to take control of advertising around their webpages on the service.

Contextually relevant ads are currently placed around the webpages featured on Fast Flip and publishers share the revenue from these with Google. The new plans reported by la Repubblica would allow publishers to sell this ad space.

"We introduced Fast Flip as an experiment in Google Labs in September 2009. We're still working hard to improve the service. We certainly hope to move it out of Google Labs at some point, but we have no immediate plans or timetable to do so,” a spokesman from Google told Journalism.co.uk.

"Our focus for the Fast Flip experiment is to make it engaging for our users and attractive to publishers. We're of course exploring ways that we can help our publishing partners generate more revenue. We don't have any immediate plans to allow all of the nearly 100 publishers that are in Fast Flip today to sell ads that appear next to their content, though this is an option we could explore in the future."