Microsoft plans to shut down the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Web sites and stop scanning library and copyright books. Microsoft entered the book-scanning business in 2005 by contributing material to the Open Content Alliance, an industry group conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo. In 2006, it unveiled its competing MSN book search site.
“Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries,” Satya Nadella, senior vice president of search, portal and advertising for Microsoft, wrote in a blog post .
Microsoft has scanned 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles during the life of the projects, he said. That material will still be available in Live search results, but not through separate indexes. Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.
Microsoft’s decision also leaves the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital archive that was paid by Microsoft to scan books, looking for new sources of support. Several major libraries said that they had chosen to work with the Internet Archive rather than with Google, because of restrictions Google placed on the use of the new digital files.
Some search experts said Microsoft’s decision to end its book-scanning effort suggested that the company, whose search engine has lagged far behind those of Google and Yahoo, was giving up on efforts to be comprehensive.
Source: Infoworld
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