Microsoft launches Live book search
Microsoft has expanded its Live services with the release of a book search for Live Search.
The service, potentially a rival to Google’s book search, will include books from the collections of the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto, with others being added next year.
The current archive contains non-copyright material, but Microsoft has also been working on securing deals with copyright holders to make other books available for searching.
“We feel very strongly about copyright. We don’t do any mass scanning of in-copyright works,” said Danielle Tiedt, the general manager of Live Search Selection for Microsoft.
“We’ve focused on making the search experience really impactful…People will have full access to all of the text,” she said.
Microsoft may also focus in future on combining these book results with other Live searches and making the results as relevant as possible.
Related stories: Google’s winning the UK search engine battle | The search engine with a heart | Ms. Dewey: Search engine with a really annoying personality | Green search engine will plant you a tree for free | Face Recognition Search Engine Looking for Volunteers
