Microsoft Shuts Digitizing Book Search Program
San Francisco – Microsoft Corp. on Friday said that it is ceasing its quest to a project to scan millions of world’s books and scholarly articles and make them available on the Web, an initiative launched less than three years ago, as the technology titan revamps its strategy to battle Internet search king Google.
“With the majority of opinion, Microsoft’s book-digitizing initiative was a ‘me-too’ response to Google’s effort, which began in 2004.”
The world’s biggest software maker is stressed out to show it has a coherent strategy for turning around its unprofitable online business after its bid for Yahoo Inc., last valued at $47.5 billion, collapsed this month.
The announcement, posted on a company blog, appears two days after Microsoft said it would concentrate its Internet search efforts on certain areas where it sees an opportunity to compete against Google.
“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,” wrote Satya Nadella, a senior vice president at Microsoft, in a matter-of-fact blog post.
“Digitizing books and archiving academic journals no longer accommodates with the company’s plan for its search operation, for this reason, we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs,” Nadella wrote.
Some prominent search specialists said Microsoft’s decision to end its book-scanning effort suggested that the company, whose search engine has lagged far behind those of Google and Yahoo, was giving up on efforts to be comprehensive.
Microsoft started its virtual library projects after Google embarked on an ambitious and controversial campaign to make all written works available free online in digital format.
“Microsoft has been pursuing Google pretty aggressively and that is just foolish on their behalf,” Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle, said in a statement.
“I believe Microsoft understands that chasing Google is just stupid and discontinuing efforts that do not make sense for them is smart.”
“It makes you wonder what else is likely to go,” said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the blog Search Engine Land. “One of the reasons people turn to Google is that it tries to be a search player in all aspects of search.”
Sullivan added that the number of people using book search services from Microsoft and Google was relatively small, but it included librarians, researchers and other so-called early adopters who often influence others. These users are now likely to turn to Google with increasing frequency, he said.
“Based on our experience, we recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, but we envision 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,” Nadella said.
Spokesman Scott Trepanier declined to give any details on how much Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft had spent on the book project.
Microsoft is making changes to its Internet business as it is determined to battle with Google, owner of the dominant search engine. On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled a program offering rebates to shoppers who buy items through its Live.com search system, taking a different tack than Google.
Both Microsoft and Google began scanning older books that have fallen into the public domain, as well as copyright-protected books under agreements with some publishers. Although, Google also scans copyrighted works without permission so it can show short excerpts to searchers, an approach that has drawn fire from publishers.
All told, Microsoft began digitizing copies of discontinued books in December 2006, later making deals with publishers to scan their books, after Google started a similar program with libraries. The Microsoft program digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles, Nadella said.
Google, which scans books of 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.
“We are extremely committed to Google Book Search, Google Scholar and other initiatives to bring more content online,” said Adam Smith, product management director at Google.
Microsoft’s decision to close down the scanning project leaves the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital archive that was paid by Microsoft to scan books, looking for new sources of support.
“We are disappointed,” said Brewster Kahle, chairman of the Internet Archive. Kahle said, however, that his organization recognized that the project, which has been scanning about 1,000 books each day, would not receive corporate support indefinitely. Kahle said that Microsoft was reducing its support slowly and that the Internet Archive had enough money to keep the project “going for a while.”
“Eventually funding will come from the public sphere,” Kahle said.
Analysts stated that Google now retain an undisputed position as king of online search and advertising frees it to devote riches to building a global online library in keeping with its stated mission of indexing the world’s information.
However they argue Microsoft, a distant third in online search, cannot have enough money to waste online search division resources on a questionably profitable, legally troublesome and labor intensive campaign to digitize books.
“Given the advancement 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,” Nadella wrote.
“I hope this indicates they will be competing more intelligently going forward instead of reacting tactically to Google,” Enderle said of Microsoft.