Google today announced that it is adding magazines to its lineup for Google Book Search. These magazines include publications like Popular Science and New York Magazine, but also more obscure publications like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In the long run, Google expects to add search results from these magazines to its main Google.com search results.
It is not clear if Google struck a deal with specific publishers to allow for this, but the selection of included magazines still feels a bit uneven and leaves out quite a few well known publications like Time, Newsweek, and Wired.
For the included magazines, however, this new feature means that you can now get a full view of every edition up to the most current issue, which is definitely a major addition to Book Search and greatly expands the breadth of topics covered by the database. A number of sites already feature a wide range of magazines online, but the legal status of a lot of these sites is rather dubious. Some magazines, like PC Magazine, are also experimenting with online versions of their printed editions.
Google has been adding a lot of content to its databases lately. Just last month, Google also added images from the Time-Life catalog to Image Search and the company also added newspapers to Google Book Search in September.
Overall, this is a great addition to Book Search, even though the selection of magazines is still a bit lacking. We do expect, however, that Google will increase the number of included magazines over time.
