Not content with aiming to scan and post searchable copies of every book ever written, Google is doing the same with magazines. Well, not every magazine apparently, or at least not right away. The official blog post announcing this intriguing new feature mentioned New York magazine, Popular Science, Ebony, and also Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Plug in your search term and magazine hits will appear alongside your hits from books. Or you can browse back issues of a particular magazine, some of them relatively recent. (The latest issue of Popular Science I could find was February 2008.)

I'd love to point you to a complete list of the scanned magazines, but there doesn't seem to be one. I guess that's understandable, since it would be changing constantly. What does seem to work is this search string: keyword "magazine name" If Google hasn't scanned that particular mag, you won't get any hits. If they have, then that's an entry point that lets you browse other issues. Alas, not much help with the multitudinous magazines with one-word names.

Google says it plans to integrate hits from magazines into its general results eventually.