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Microsoft cedes book scanning and search

SEATTLE: Microsoft is abandoning its effort to scan whole libraries and make their contents searchable, a sign that it may be getting choosier about the fights it will pick with Google.

The world’s largest software maker is under pressure to show that it has a coherent strategy to turn around its unprofitable online business after its bid for Yahoo, last valued at $47.5 billion, collapsed this month.

Digitising books and archiving academic journals no longer fits with the company’s plan for its search operation, wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s search and advertising group, in a blog post on Friday.

Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the U.S. company said.

Mr. Nadella said Microsoft will focus on “verticals with high commercial intent.” At an advertising confab at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters this week, he demonstrated a new system that rewards customers with cash rebates for using Live Search to find and buy items on advertisers’ sites.

Microsoft entered the book-scanning business in 2005 by contributing material to the Open Content Alliance, an industry group conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo. In 2006, it unveiled its competing MSN book search site.

Unlike Google, whose decision to scan books still protected under copyright law has provoked multiple lawsuits, Microsoft stuck to scanning books with the permission of publishers or that were firmly in the public domain. The company said it would give publishers digital copies of the 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles it has amassed.

The company’s ceding the book-search segment to Google and the Open Content Alliance could signal Microsoft has a new search strategy and is ready to jettison its unsuccessful me-too efforts. — AP

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