Pretty fricking great: This morning Google added dozens of old magazines to its Book Search database. These are scans of entire magazines, ads included. What a trove it is, and I’m sure it’s just the beginning. Here is New York magazine in its earliest glory days:

Now we just gotta get them to add the full run of Spy (the funny years, at least).

Early on a summer morning in 1978, the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch attached a gyro-stabilized camera to the front of a Ferrari 275GTB. He turned on the camera and handed the car keys to a professional racecar driver, who fired up the engine and then sped through the center of Paris at about 140 miles per hour. The resulting eight-minute film, C’etait un rendezvous, is a classic. Thanks to Google Video and YouTube, it’s gotten a lot of web attention in recent months. But here’s something new: A blogger named Brian Hendrix has created a Google Maps mashup that displays the car’s location on a map as the driver rockets himself through Paris:

Lelouch has apparently claimed that it was he who was behind the wheel; he supposedly also said that the car was a Mercedes, not a Ferrari, and that the sounds of a Ferrari were overdubbed later. But I don’t have the energy to investigate whether (a) he actually claimed these things or (b) the claims are actually true.

[via someone on Echo.]

UPDATE: I posted a follow-up to this item a few days later.

While putting together the item I posted last night about Ravi Jain’s videoblog DriveTime, I googled my friend Dennis Crowley’s name to find an appropriate link or two to include. And I noticed that Dens has set up a little joke for himself on Google. This is one of the text ads that appears in the upper-right-hand corner of the results page when you google his name:

It was probably easy for Dens to set up this joke ad, because he works for Google.

An enterprising person on livejournal.com discovered that Google’s amazing new satellite mapping technology would allow him to access aerial photos of Area 51, the secretive government facility in Arizona that plays a major role in U.F.O. conspiracy theories: