Microsoft made an announcement in its company blog that it will shut down its book search program to scan millions of books and scholarly articles and those will show up in regular search results rather than Live Search Books and Live Search Academic.

Microsoft is making an effort to enhance its internet search in certain area where its search engine is lagging far behind those of Google and Yahoo. In this effort Microsoft would offer Cashback service to shopper who buys products while searching online.

Google is scanning books from public domain but it also scans short excerpts of some copyright work without permission, which provoked multiple lawsuits where as Microsoft scans only books of public domain and copyright material with the permission of publishers.

Google dose not consider violation to scan copyrighted work for short snippets. As this was argue that made by Google in 2005, when publishers and authors sued Google.

Microsoft is digitizing 750,000 books and indexing 80 million journal articles where as Google is working with about 10,000 publishers to digitize their books, reported by los angles times. According to nytimes.com, Google is planning to scan 15 million books in the next decade.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Tags: Book Search, Digital Library, Google, Live Search Academic, Live Search Books, Microsoft

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.