Thursday, May 29, 2008

Bye-Bye Microsoft Book Search

The Chronicle recently posted an online article announcing the end of Microsoft's Live Book Search project.

Initial evidence indicates that Microsoft could not keep up with Google Book Search. I reported that Google had already topped the 2 million title mark in their book scanning project back in October; Microsoft is ending its project at 750,000 titles (plus 80 million journal articles). Given Google's commanding lead in the numbers race, it is difficult to imagine anyone else rivalling the Google Books collection for sheer quantity. The Open Content Alliance and others, though, may still be able to trump Google in terms of quality.

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