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Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has abandoned its efforts to scan books and academic journals and will shut down the online search engine services it has operated for conducting research using them, called Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, as part of a shift towards focusing on areas of Internet search that have "high commercial intent," the company announced Friday. After A Quarter Million Books, Microsoft Calls It Quits Since 2005 Microsoft has been involved in efforts to scan and index books and academic journals, with programs attempting to offer the same type of information often difficult to find online that  search leader Google first began doing in 2004 with its increasingly popular Google Book Search program. In shutting down the two programs that have digitized an estimated 750,000 books and 80 million articles from scholarly journals, Microsoft acknowledged that online searchers and publishers were likely to view the closures as "disappointing news," according to a blog announcement the company's vice president for search and advertising Satya Nadella made Friday. Microsoft said it will shut down its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic programs because they don't match the company's new business plans such as its Live Search Cashback program announced two days earlier, a rebate program that pays users money for commercial purchases made using its search engine. To academics, librarians and other researchers who have found the two search services being shut down by Microsoft to be useful resources, it may indeed be disappointing, as Nadella noted, that the company instead plans to move more of its search efforts towards "verticals with high commercial intent," as Nadella added in the Friday announcement. Microsoft Book And Journal Programs To Shut Down This Week Beginning this week Microsoft will shut down its book and academic search programs and point online searchers looking for digitized books and academic journal articles to non-Microsoft Web sites, the company said. Shutting down the two research and academic programs, Microsoft said, will help with its vision of a new long-term search strategy. "We believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer and content partner," wrote Nadella, who was also on hand during the unveiling of Microsoft's Live Search Cashback program last Wednesday. Some analysts saw Microsoft's decision to end its decidedly non-commercial Live Search Books and Live Search Academic programs as a sign the world's biggest software maker has acknowledged Google as the victor in book and academic journal search efforts, and that the company intends to focus primarily on the commercial aspects of search. Comments by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates last week appeared to point to such a shift. "We believe search can offer much more value to consumers and advertisers than it does today, and we see Live Search Cashback as an important opportunity to deliver additional value," said Gates, who delivered a keynote address for online advertisers during Microsoft's annual Advance08 conference in Redmond. "Our goal is to make Live Search the most rewarding commercial search destination on the Web," said Gates. Microsoft had partnered with a nonprofit digital archival preservation organization called the Internet Archive and paid it to scan books for its search programs, however with Microsoft's decision to abandon the programs, the Internet Archive will have to seek replacement funding sources. "Today, Microsoft has announced that it will ramp down their investment in this area," noted Internet Archive chairman Brewster Kahle in an announcement on the organization's Web site Monday. "Going forward we will need to replace the Microsoft funding," Kahle wrote. The Internet Archive, which has also received funding from various libraries and foundations, manages 13 scanning centers in libraries and digitizes about 1000 books a day, according to Kahle. Microsoft Abandons Live Search Book and Academic Projects Microsoft said that it will give publishers scanned copies of the books and journal articles it has converted into  digital format over the years, a move Kahle said was important to his organization. "To their credit, they said they are taking off any contractual restrictions on the public domain books and letting us keep the equipment that they funded," wrote Kahle. "This is extremely important because it can allow those of us in the public sphere to leverage what they helped build," Kahle added. Google meanwhile said that it remains committed to its Google Book Search program, and with the departure of what many analysts saw as its biggest rival in the book scanning and search market, it appears likely Google will have a clearer path on its plan to scan 15 million books during the next decade. Related Links:
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10:09 pm on May 27, 2008 (utc 0)