Google is all over the map lately, it seems. A day after they approve ads for liquor, only a few months after they approved ads for beer (it took decades for TV to put hard booze on the air), Google has added magazines to Google Book Search.

This has the potential to be an amazing resource for students and academics, and demonstrates Google’s continued efforts to provide services and content that while not easily monetized provide a significant positive effect to the web.

Right now, magazines like Popular Science, Ebony, and New York are featured, a long with some more obscure ones, but more are going to be added. Magazine results will appear when users make searches in Google Book Search, and we be denoted with a “Magazine” tag.

Google has said they now have the ability to scan PDF files, and it would be really amazing if they could use that technology to scan all of the magazines (and newspapers, for that matter) that haven’t been converted to search engine-friendly text.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 12:56 amand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.