[babalulu]

Google Books has issues of Billboard magazine dating back to 1942. It used to be valuable for research, but it's become much less so over the years. Currently, search results that return actual magazine issues are limited to the first page. After that, it's just normal Google links. Even searching for something like Elvis or Glenn Miller, both of whom should have been in a crapload of issues, returns only one page of relevant results.

Trying to search by date is very hard. Limiting search to "Glenn Miller October 1942" might return one or two relevant results, or it might not return any. Trying to search by issue date doesn't work at all.

They have an index of Billboard issues which allows you to go to individual issues and read them, but the index stops at 50 pages, and for a weekly magazine, that limits the index to only a handful of years. Using the index, you can't go directly to issues before the 1980s, and with search by issue date useless, that means you're just out of luck if you want to see a particular issue in the 1970s.

[rasz]

They do seem to be crippling book search on purpose. Just yesterday I was looking for "PC Mag 1997 january Pentium MMX" and Google refused to return PC Mag 7 Jan 1997 issue results, whats even more weird clicking "browse all issues" returns

    The requested URL /books/serial/ISSN:08888507?rview=1 was not found on this server

but "About this magazine" will happily give you a list of all scanned issues :o and opening january one will let you search it and will return positive results.