Microsoft Admits Defeat in Book Search
May. 23rd, 2008 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yesthattomMicrosoft announces they are ending their Book Search effort. The web sites for books.live.search (which was their response to Google Book Search) and academic.live.com (their blatant attempt to clone Google Scholar).
Their blog post could use some translation:
“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.” -- Uhh, we couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable
“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 original goal was to make available rare and out-of-print books, but we think the same goals can be met by just indexing books that are so non-rare that they appear on the web already.
”For example, this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, -- We hope you didn’t read that previous sentence where we said that a general search is more important, because actually we’re going to be adopting a “vertical search” strategy, which is the opposite.
“We have learned a tremendous amount from our experience and believe this decision, while a hard one, can serve as a catalyst for more sustainable strategies.” -- We only did it because Google was doing it. How they make money at it is a mystery to us. Maybe we should scan “The Long Tail”
No, seriously... “The Long Tail” doesn’t exist in Microsoft’s product but is the first “hit” on Google’s product. That’s freakin’ awesome!
Their blog post could use some translation:
“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.” -- Uhh, we couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable
“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 original goal was to make available rare and out-of-print books, but we think the same goals can be met by just indexing books that are so non-rare that they appear on the web already.
”For example, this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, -- We hope you didn’t read that previous sentence where we said that a general search is more important, because actually we’re going to be adopting a “vertical search” strategy, which is the opposite.
“We have learned a tremendous amount from our experience and believe this decision, while a hard one, can serve as a catalyst for more sustainable strategies.” -- We only did it because Google was doing it. How they make money at it is a mystery to us. Maybe we should scan “The Long Tail”
No, seriously... “The Long Tail” doesn’t exist in Microsoft’s product but is the first “hit” on Google’s product. That’s freakin’ awesome!
no subject
Date: 2008-05-23 09:21 pm (UTC)