• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, December 9, 2008

Magazine addicts and history buffs rejoice: Google said Tuesday that it is creating digital archives for the print editions of dozens of big-name consumer magazines (along with some lesser ones) stretching back decades. The news comes not long after Google said it was making the entire photo archive of Life--about 10 million images--available online, including many that have never appeared in print.

For magazine publishers that choose to participate, the Google magazine archive will post the entire issue of each magazine online in a format designed for easy searching. At first, the archive will be searchable through Google Books; however, Google plans to eventually make the archive searchable through its main search page as well.

Looking at a particular issue, the reader can scroll through the entire magazine from cover to cover, or use a digitized table of contents to skip to a particular article. A search box allows multiword searches. Participating magazines include Hearst's Popular Mechanics, Town & Country, Quick & Simple and Veranda. New York, Popular Science and Ebony have also been archived.

The online search giant posts contextual ads on the right-hand side of the viewer. The contextual ads can be targeted by the cover text, the content of a particular article, or even the advertising. For example, scrolling through the February 1973 issue of Ebony, with the cover story "Is the Afro on the Way Out?" one first sees contextual ads for hair care products--but lingering over an old life insurance ad from New York Life, the contextual ads switch to insurance providers.

In September, Google unveiled a nearly identical project to transfer the historical archives of newspapers to its growing online library of books and academic articles, reaching back to the very first print editions. The newspaper archive project is intended to benefit participating newspaper publishers by helping them monetize vast amounts of text.

Some big newspaper publishers have already moved to digitize their print archives: The New York Times, for example, has scanned and made searchable articles dating back to its 1851 founding. These archives and similar collections created by The Washington Post and Time are already searchable by Google users. Papers that are participating in the new Google project include The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and St. Petersburg Times, although any newspaper may participate.