Friday, May 23, 2008

Microsoft Kills Book Search

Microsoft said today that it is ending its Live Search Books and Live Search Academics projects, including the company's initiatives to digitize books from libraries. According to the firm's Live Search blog, Microsoft's move is part of an effort to we develop an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. Specifically, the company's strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent. Microsoft said it believes the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. Microsoft initially launched its book search effort in October of 2005 in response to Google's launch of Google Books.