Livesearch and “That Book Stuff”

Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, 30 of May , 2008 at 11:40 am

The Livesearch team over at Microsoft announced last week that they would be effectively ending the Live Search books and Live Search Academic projects, and that the accompanying sites would be taken down.

According to the livesearch blog:

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. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of the industry and evaluate future opportunities.
As we wind down Live Search Books, we are reaching out to participating publishers and libraries. We are encouraging libraries to build on the platform we developed with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others to create digital archives available to library users and search engines.
In partnership with Ingram Digital Group, we are also reaching out to participating publishers with information about new marketing and sales opportunities designed to help them derive ongoing benefits from their participation in the Live Search Books Publisher Program.

The underlying tone of the article? The project was great and worthy and all, but they weren’t making any money.

While the death knell is still sounding for livesearch books, the blog cheerily annouced their new focus:

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.

The (between the lines lesson) learned? If you want to read a book, go to the library, but if you want to make money, go on the internet.

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