Google quietly released a new product via its Google Labs page that quite possibly represents the most significant peek behind the curtains directly at the evil genius planning to take over the world that anyone outside of the Googleplex has ever had.  It is called “Fast Flip“, and to layman’s eyes– it is just a news reader.

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.