Book Search

Posted on May 23, 2008

Microsoft announced it is ending a project to scan millions of books and scholarly articles and make them available on the Web. This comes shortly behind them saying they would focus search efforts on certain areas where they find opportunities to compete with Google. Good luck on finding those.To start out the ‘opportunity efforts’, Microsoft unveiled a program this week offering rebates to users who buy items that they find using the company’s search engine.

Both Microsoft and Google have been scanning older books that have fallen into the public domain, as well as copyright-protected books under agreements with some publishers. Google also scans copyrighted works without permission so it can show short excerpts to searchers, an approach that has drawn fire from publishers.Microsoft said it had digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles.

Google, which works with libraries like the New York Public Library and those at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and Oxford, said it had scanned more than a million books. It plans to scan 15 million in the next decade. Google makes the books it scans freely available through its search engine but does not allow other search engines to use its database.