http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/search-and-find-magazines-on-google.html

It's very fast fast: I prefer this viewer to the Google Docs' PDF one.
I love how the ads update themselves when scrolling down a magazine.
I'm amazed how a February 2008 mag can looks old compared to a 1999 web page ;)
I wish all magazines were online, from 1990 to 2000, like Sciences Avenir, Le Spectacle du Monde, Geo... There are so much souvenirs in their pages! (I've never had a TV)

The Economist forecasts well
http://books.google.com/books?id=ut-2AAAAIAAJ&q=google+date:0-1998&dq=google+date:0-1998&lr=&as_brr=0&as_pt=ALLTYPES&ei=CsY-SbGGA42ONoa_lcUG&pgis=1 (published in 1960)

Obama was born in Serbia!
http://books.google.com/books?id=9eQCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA19&dq=Rick+Astley&as_brr=1&ei=bsg-SfWvK5HQMvaL1L8G

Bonus: http://books.google.com/books?id=DAsAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA43&dq=philipp+lenssen&lr=&as_brr=1&as_pt=ALLTYPES&ei=acQ-SfuPMZu8M-LphdIG

Jérôme, Google always prints the date the magazine was started (or from the year their archive starts?) next to the overview page...

When, oh when, oh when... will they start indexing vintage comics online? That would be the coolest thing.

Philipp Lenssen
Does it mean that the date parameter doesn't work "normally" with magazines?

When I search books published before 1990, I expect that all papers published after 1990 to be excluded from the results.
http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/2180/datetx2.png
In the example above, I find the second result disturbing. I expect that The Economist wrote in 1981 about Lary and Sergey, but with all due respect to the Economist, I don't believe it.

Indicating when the first issue of the Economist was published – or the year of the first issue scanned by Google – don't add any value but misleads the user.

Jim, I made a mockup in 2006:

<not-real, strictly hypothetic>
http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-comic-book-search.jpg
</not-real, strictly hypothetic>

BTW, it's not the first time Google scans magazines. Think about Google Catalog ;)
[if you search well, you will find a lot of NSFW magazines in Google Catalogs....]

Jérôme, I agree it's confusing in that position...

Philipp (& TOMHTML): "I’m not sure if there were really no magazines at all in Google Book search before, though that’s how I understand Google’s announcement"

There were no mainstream, large-run pagescans of magazines in Book Search before. There were plenty such – usually scholarly journals and the like – available online, thus sometimes in search results, but most were walled-off gardens. Latest example of that is the entire 83+ press run of The New Yorker, which has been made available a few years ago first on 8 data-DVDs + 2 update discs to date; then on a standalone hard drive, and now behind an id-password fence @newyorker.com – a perk to all subscribers, or US$40-something electronic subscription-only option.

[ Incidentially, the copyright/ redistribution and reimbursment talks with U.S.-mag publishers must've been a nightmare – even compared to the long-drawn process for these with book publishers. Unlike books, that were always distributed in more than one fashion, the magazines usually rely on either spur-of-the-moment newsstand sales, or recurrent subscription models. So making their archives available online must have been presented by Google as a ready-made and cheap presence incentive to drive sales of current issues. Do not therefore expect there to be the latest/ in-print back mag issues!]

Collected a couple of interesting ads from Google Book search's "Popular Science" collection: http://captionx.com/page/ads