Google Search has evolved in the past decade into the most popular search engine on the Internet, and went from indexing web pages, to indexing documents, such as PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, but also videos, photos, and most recently, magazine archives.

Millions of magazines have been released over the past centuries, ever since William Defoe published world’s first English magazine. Google indicated in its most recent announcement that magazines could not be left out of search queries.

Therefore, the search giant teamed up with publishers to digitize millions of articles published over the years in various magazines, such as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and Ebony.

Users will be able to read or re-read articles in full color and in their original context, as they would in the original magazine. Furthermore, they will be able to scroll pages back and forth, or use the Browse all issues feature to view decades-old issues.

Magazine searches can be performed through Google Book Search. Google explained magazine results will be found alongside book results, but will be tagged with the keyword “Magazine.”

In time, more and more results will be added, but in the meantime, users can check out for themselves the new search offering, by following some of these links: [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword].

Just last month, Google announced the availability of one of the most amazing photo collections in the world, the LIFE photo archive, in digitized format. Millions of photos are expected to be added to the collection, most of which have never been published before.

The search results include photos and etchings produced by LIFE magazine that date back to the 1750s, Google said.

The collection includes the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, The Mansell Collection from London, the Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s, but also other valuable works from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen, as well as tens of other photographers, capturing everything from world events, to the evolution of fashion, or the lives of everyday people.

At the end of October, Google also added scanned documents to the search results. Until recently, scanned documents were not included in search results because their content was hard to be indexed. The quality of the paper, the ink smudges or fold creases in the pages often fool computers, making it hard to make a distinction between some symbol or words and ink smudges. But thanks to the Optical Character Technology, that will no longer be a problem.

In another move by Google, signed-in users are given the possibility to customize their search results, by adding, removing or re-ranking comments on search results, in ways that make their search experience much more dynamic and useful, without affecting other users’ experience though.

As Dave Foulser, Google Software Engineer, noted on the company’s blog, Google has been working for years on making as much information as possible accessible online, and every new addition represents a big step toward achieving the ultimate goal, of providing access to all the world’s information.