The Live Search team at Microsoft recently announced that they are winding up their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects.

“Given the evolution of the Web and our 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. For example, this past
Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial
intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our
advertisers. With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized
750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. 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.” — livesearch.

Live Search : Book search winding down

I haven’t used live search academic for a very long time. And I’m not sure why. I liked the interface and the way results were presented in way suited to academia. It just slipped below my horizon. I do make extensive use of open search plugins. Perhaps if I had added it to my browser search tool I’d still be a regular user.

Microsoft will not be competing with Google in the book digitisation stakes, but it seems they prefer to say that they are not competing with publishers and libraries.