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Live Search Books was announced in October 2005 as MSN Book Search with considerable hoopla, plans to digitize the British Library, and verbal fisticuffs with Google over copyright and Google Book Search, but it has all come to nought as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella announced today:
Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.
This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users.
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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.
The rest of Nadella’s comments can be summarized as "Microsoft couldn’t figure out how to make any money on this stuff." I remarked when MSN Book Search was announced that the business model was rather vague and apparently altruism was not a sufficient rationale.
Microsoft today made an omnibus executive rearrangement announcement covering a variety of Corporate and Senior Vice Presidents. Here are the novel aspects from my perspective:
Last week, the aQuantive shareholders voted their approval of the company’s acquisition by Microsoft (as well they might since the offer was roughly twice aQuantive’s market cap). Today, Microsoft announced completion of the acquisition and the creation of a new Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group with former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews as the newly anointed Microsoft Web Ad Czar.
After Microsoft corporate VP Satya Nadella let the cat out of the bag last week, Microsoft’s PR folks belatedly came up with a statement yesterday revealing a pilot for a new free, ad-supported version of Works called Microsoft Works SE 9:
