Surprisingly, no viable centralized search service currently exists for magazine content.  In one study, when searches by subject matter were conducted on Google, Yahoo, and About.com for the lead articles in the ten most popular magazines in America, not one of these articles made it into the top 50 search results in its category.

Existing search services just aren’t set up to recognize major magazines as the content that people have shown they want most.  Instead, they force them through arcane cataloging processes that allow all sorts of obscure sites and individual rants to effectively trump them, forcing them so far down the list of search results as to be effectively invisible.

Help is on the horizon, though.  The same service that enables trusted taste mavens to recommend new online music to users can also enable them to recommend new online written content.

The service has a wrinkle than can be of special utility to magazine content.  Since major magazines already have trusted names, rather than wait for someone else to recommend their articles, they could effectively recommend this material themselves.

Consumers won’t mind this.  In fact, they’ll appreciate it, since a major magazine’s name tends to be taken as an imprimatur of quality.  If users are looking for information on a particular car and find an article recommended by Car and Driver, far from being turned off by the knowledge that this is a self-recommendation, they’ll take it as a sign that the article is well written and engagingly presented.