There’s a new article at the SBL website entitled “Google Books and Biblical Studies: A Developing Resource.” If you’re not familiar with Google Books, this article will give you a good overview of the potential that Google Books has for research.
Google also has a site called Google Scholar, which, in addition to searching all the books from Google Books, searches lots of major journals like Journal of Biblical Literature, Novum Testamentum, The American Journal of Theology, and Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and other things like Society of Biblical Literature: Seminar Papers. With a couple of these (SBL and NT) you won’t be able to view the hits in the resources themselves, but at least you are taken to the first page of the article so you know where to look it up in the print copy if it looks promising.
I also recently found out that you can search all of Amazon’s searchable books at the same time. Go to A9.com and select “books by Amazon.”
These are valuable resources that you’ll want to bookmark and use.