EQUTE — The next move in Google News is designed to make publishers and readers happy with integrated results from Google Fast Flip.

Fast Flip is Google’s article reading helper, which gives publishers more space to show off their site instead of turning every article into a hyperlink like Google News alone does. The practice was riling some publishers that said Google News turned their hard work into a commodity for Google instead of the publisher.

Google responded to blogger Steve Rubel saying that the integration was one of their many search tests.

Hi Steve, I work with the Google News team. At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. A few weeks ago we started running a few small ones exploring how we might incorporate results from Fast Flip into Google News. From these tests we hope to learn whether including Fast Flip results in Google News would provide a good experience for users and news publishers. More information about how Google runs experiments can be found here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/search-experiments-large-and-small.html

Google hasn’t said when the new feature will be rolling out, but it could appease a great many publishers. Speculation also says that the change could build the framework for creating paywalls to articles — maybe Rupert Murdoch won’t leave Google.