Subject: ResearchBuzz: “Google Says: This is Your LIFE!” plus 1 more
From: Mykie Howard (my.howard@MOREHEADSTATE.EDU)
Date: 9/29/09 9:09 AM

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Subject: ResearchBuzz: “Google Says: This is Your LIFE!” plus 1 more

ResearchBuzz: “Google Says: This is Your LIFE!” plus 1
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Google Says: This is Your LIFE!
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/researchbuzz/main/~3/bUAfmpSVH1E/

Posted: 28 Sep 2009 04:40 AM PDT

The picture collection came out a while ago, but Google recently announced
http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/09/life-magazine-now-available-on-google.html

that the entire run of LIFE magazine — over 1800 issues from 1936 to
1972 — are now available on Google Books. I wish Google Books had some
kind of nice-looking “splash URL” where you could start a browse of a
digitized magazine, but you’ll have to start with
http://books.google.com/books?id=R1cEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s#all_issues_anchor.

You can browse issues (and from the look of these early 70s covers, it’s
really tempting) but you can also search by keyword. I did a search for
computers and was a bit surprised to see over 250 results. Flipping
through the results it looks like the earliest results are from the
mid-1950s, but I’m not sure about that because I can’t find a way to
sort my search results by issue date (AW C’MON GOOGLE!)

I picked an article from November 1957 and took a look. You view the
magazine by pages, and sometimes the print makes that a little tough.
But you can zoom, pan, etc.

One thing you might be surprised about is the fact that Google has
apparently indexed the text of the ads as well as the articles. One of
the tests I ran (”circuit board”) ended up finding a lot of ads for GE
televisions — not quite what I expected. On the other hand, browsing
these old magazines always gets me distracted by the old ads anyway.
Keep an eye out for the enormous Sylvania “Slimline” televisions. (Buy a
TV and get a free electric blanket!)

I feel like Google designs these scanned magazines more for browsing
than for serious searching (you can’t sort results by date, you can’t
search article text separately from ad text, etc.) but they ARE a fun
browse. Worth a look.