Google brings famous magazine archives to the web

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 10 December 2008 05:24

Your IT - Home IT

Google Book Search is well known, and earlier this year newspaper archives were added to the mix. Now it's the turn of the magazine industry to make its old content readily searchable and accessible.

Google has revealed it has been working with magazine publishers to digitise millions of articles from a diverse range of titles.

Magazines that turn up in Google Book Search include Cincinnati Magazine, Ebony, Jet, New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Vegetarian Times.

Back issues are scanned so that searchers get an authentic view of how the publication actually appeared, and optical character recognition is used to automate the indexing process.

Newspaper publishers can choose whether they provide free access to back issues via Google Book Search, or use it to draw traffic to pay-to-view archives, so we assume the same goes for magazines. That said, all of the searches we tried led to free-access page images.

Google Book Searches can be restricted to magazines by using the Advanced Book Search link.

The company plans to extend magazine results into the main Google search engine.

"For years, we've worked to make as much information as possible accessible online, whether that information comes from books, newspapers, or images," said Dave Foulser, a Google software engineer.

"We think that bringing more magazines online is one more important step toward our long-standing goal of providing access to all the world's information.