Google adds magazine content

Although erstwhile digital publisher Mygazines.com has gone the way of all things, the future of magazine publishing may still live online – at least, if Google has its way.

According to CNet, everyone's favourite data warehouse has teamed up with a range of publishers and content owners to add magazine content into the company's existing Book Search service.

With magazines including Popular Science, Men's Health, Popular Mechanics, and New York Magazine the content is already shaping up nicely – and with back catalogues being added, the service could rapidly turn out to be a real boon to Google's print search capabilities. In exchange for the ability to make the content freely available, the publishers are given links on the result pages directing searchers to their official websites – as well as a boost to brand recognition, of course.

Unfortunately – and in common with an existing agreement the company has with Life Magazine to make photographic content available via the Image Search – there is no central portal from which the magazine content can be accessed. Instead, a "magazine" tag can be used to exclude books from searches within the existing Book Search database.

As well as scanned copies of each page in a given magazine, the service offers a Google Maps interface which overlays places mentioned within the text. It's a neat mash-up, and something that you wouldn't get from a traditional content archive.

The magazine content is live on Google's Book Search now, with the back catalogue digitisation process continuing to add more.

Do you think that Google – with the agreement of publishers – can succeed where Mygazines.com failed, or is print still the king of all media? Share your thoughts over in the forums.