Some New Features of Interest at Google

Google is an excellent resource for the historian and genealogist and the company is always introducing exciting new features. I am an avid user of Google Books and Google Scholar. Below are two recent features added to the Google site of interest to researchers:

Magazines Added to Google Books
Google Books has been an excellent resource for researchers. Now Google is adding magazines to the massive digitized collection. In December Google announced an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony. It is interesting to be able to search and view complete issues of magazines as far back as the 1870’s. It is simply a glimpse into daily life showing what people wore, how folks lived and worked and what was advertised. The search capability of these magazines is a huge asset for the researcher. More and more magazines are set to appear in Google Book search results and you can limit your search only to magazines through the advanced search features. From the Google Books search page, simply click “Advanced Book Search” and from the advanced book search page, select “Magazines."

Search-by-style Options at Google Image Search
Researchers use Google Image Search to find images of places and people, diagrams for articles and clip art for print and digital presentations. Before now, all types of image results were grouped together – from photographs and clip art to line drawings. Now with Google Image Search, we can limit our search results depending on the type of image we are looking for. From the Google Image Search page click “Advanced Image Search.” From the advanced search page, under Content Type you can select from any content, news content, faces, photo contents, clip art and line drawings. Under size you can select any size, small, medium, large and extra large. Under file types you can select from JPG, GIF, PNG and BMP. Under coloration you can select from any colors, black and white, gray scale and full color. Additionally you can limit your search to a particular domain and also implement safe search features.