Fast Flip provides a nice web page where a user can flip through new stories much like they flip through the pages of a newspaper.  Smart.  That’s what people want, clearly.  But, there’s a little bit more going on here.

Fast Flip takes a publisher website’s content and republishes it within Google’s own domain.  Elsewhere, this is called ’scraping’ and is heavily frowned upon.  Here, Google publishes content with full attribution to its source, and even links to the original publisher site.  But, the site republishes the entire page on the Fast Flip domain.  So, in essence, most readers will never have the need to visit the source publisher’s site at all.  What does this mean?  Take a look at BBC’s page on the exact story I captured in the above screenshot:

On BBC’s own page— there are multiple ads.  There’s an internal leaderboard across the top of the page and an advertiser’s 300×250 on the right side.  Neither of these appear within Google’s scrape of the content. 

So, when a user reads the story on BBC’s own site— these ads will generate some revenue.  But, when a user reads the same story, from the same source (BBC) from within Fast Flip, only Google ads have the chance to win that revenue (and, guess what?  Google does place their own ads next to the page they create for each story).

If I’m BBC, I’m not happy about this.  If I’m any publisher, I’m at least scared. 

Here’s a glimpse into what I see here… I see a world in the not-too-distant-future where Google search results pages for any search no longer take users to a list of links to publisher websites where those publishers stand to make money from showing ads to visitors for providing valuable content, but instead take users to scrapes of those same webpages (ever clicked on ‘cached’ next to a search result?– Google already stores all web pages it crawls) where users never leave the Google.com domain. 

In this world, Google stands to hold all the cards— and can determine which content is worth paying out to publishers to provide, and which content will no longer make money through Google referrals.

Of course, Fast Flip is just for news.  Of course, Fast Flip is just a beta.  Of course, those sites will only lose the ability to monetize a very small amount of their total traffic (even if Fast Flip takes off and makes it out of beta, those sites will still maintain all the revenue except that which starts with a click from Google news).

But, if I’m a publisher of any kind (and, I am)— now is the time I start getting a little worried.  Because maybe, just maybe, this means a whole heck of a lot more than just a nice news reader.

At the time, the site was claiming:

“TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified.

Just as you are familiar with entering text in a regular search engine such as Google to find web pages that contain that text, TinEye lets you submit an image to find web pages that contain that image.”

And, just as promised… the search engine is now publicly available and fully functional.  And, to at least my partial surprise, it works fairly flawlessly.  Here’s an example:

http://tineye.com/search/fd852df5478eb7eb9410ee9101bb364adf487fb0?page=1360

I searched the Google logo straight from their homepage using the image URL as my query.  By the end of the results, it becomes clear that Tineye recognizes the content of the Google logo and not just the color/shape attributes of the letters— there are some images where the logo is skewed/distorted in a way that TinEye must truly understand some of the fundamental aspects of the logo itself.

So, I give TinEye (and its parent company Idée) a big thumbs up for progressing things.  Now, if someone would just figure out how to monetize image search in this way.  That itself may prove to be more difficult than producing a working image search engine.

Apparently, until they got word of their mistake and replaced it, the Bing home page image was of Minneapolis’s collapsed 3rd Street bridge.

Liveside.net has the full story.

Microsoft’s official comment on the topic:

“The Bing homepage image was updated shortly after 1:00pm PDT, after it was brought to our attention that the previous image of Minneapolis included the I-35 bridge which collapsed on Aug. 1, 2007. We apologize to anyone who may have been offended.”

Kind of mind-boggling, considering that Bing is front page news right now because of the Yahoo deal.  What’s next, I wonder?  Might I suggest a nice shot of a Chernobyl cooling tower?  Or, perhaps just a nice tasteful shot of the Superdome would be a more subtle way to stir those awful memories.

I watched Carol Bartz’s offiicial address this morning.  Although her demeanor was certainly polished and confident, I did sense a bit of resignation.  Afterall, Yahoo stood firm against Microsoft believing that the company was undervalued.  Now, it would seem, Yahoo has been distilled into what I have been saying it has always been— the most powerful destination site on the web.

But, there’s a second part to what I have been saying all along— and that is that no matter how good of a destination site Yahoo is, the revenue that comes with being a content site and not an advertiser platform is significantly smaller.  Thus, I expect it won’t be long before we see a leaner Yahoo altogether.  I feel for the staff who works to support search products, and the stress this must be causing you.

On a lighter note, in typical Yahoo versus Microsoft style, the homepages of each do seem reflective of the different takes on what is transpiring:

This morning, Bing features a bridge spanning two majestic and beautiful mountains (in Geneva, nonetheless).  I have no thoughts on what the dam might represent, except possibly Google:

While Yahoo has a lighter presentation on their homepage.  The image and story I was greeted with (sure it varies depending on the layout of your new Yahoo homepage) is about ‘armswinging’.  Saying that scientists have finally solved the mystery of why people swing their arms when they walk.  Well, Yahoo, that speaks volumes of the situation, in my opinion.  Microsoft is connecting mountains, and Yahoo is swinging arms.  I guess that would support what I thought I read as resignation in Carol Bartz’s presentation.

• Keep users on Yahoo pages by embedding content from other sites into the Yahoo homepage as ‘apps’
• Monetize page views of other sites’ content in those apps