For years, some Web sites — particularly those linked to newspapers — have tried valiantly to mimic the familiar columnar "style" that is the hallmark of printed publications.

The goal, of course, is to make a Web page "browse-able" in the same way a newspaper or magazine is.

But even though screen sizes have increased since the early days of the World Wide Web, it's still tough to beat a newspaper or magazine page for density of information that's digestible at a glance.

You've probably encountered attempts to replicate the paper-based experience online at sites that use animated "page flips" to let the user navigate through a document or story or advertisement. I've always felt this defeated the more traditional "click and scroll" navigation that is more suited to readers at their computer.

Now Google Labs has just introduced a simple hybrid page design that lets you quickly scan a wide variety of content while maintaining the familiarity of the Web browser.

Google Fast Flip indexes "snapshots" of individual Web pages from about 40 sites, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The Fast Flip home page (see the image at the top of this blog post) resembles a photographic "proof sheet" — you can read many headlines and see photos, but it's really just enough for a visual index. See something interesting? Just click the image; alternately, you can select a subcategory like "most viewed" or "health insurance."

Once you're in a category, you can "flip" from one page to another by clicking on the large arrows to the right and left of the page (or simply by using the right and left arrow keys, if you're more keyboard-centric like me). It is a surprisingly fast way to digest a lot of information in a very short time, because you're not waiting for all the bloated code of a traditional Web page to load into your browser. Yet you can see the content of the page as it originally appeared, with photos and graphics.

Since you're just viewing a snapshot, you must still go to the original Web site if you want to see the full story or to take advantage of any links or multimedia content — and that's as easy as clicking on the Fast Flip image.

It's not perfect, but that's only because the Web can change so quickly. A snapshot is, by definition, something that's frozen in time. I clicked on one story and found it was apparently no longer available on the originating Web site (at least I was unable to locate it).

There's even a mobile version of Fast Flip for use with iPhone and Android handsets; I don't have either, so I was unable to test that option.

Kudos to Google for trying to take the tedium out of Web browsing. Assuming that more sites agree to be a part of this service, it could quickly emerge as the best way to explore the World Wide Web when you don't really know what you're looking for.

E-mail askwalt@wfaa.com

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