Microsoft released its own book search service, that includes only out-of-copyright books and books for each Microsoft received permission. The approach is different from Google's initiative, where publishers can only opt-out from Google Book Search.But the most interesting thing about this release is a statement from Danielle Tiedt, general manager at Microsoft: "As we move out of beta, what you will see is that book content integrated with the Web content (search results on Windows Live Search). What we are focusing more of our efforts on for live searching is integrating all of those content types together to give you the most relevant results. Sometimes the most relevant will be from books. If, for example, it's a search on historical content, chances are the most authoritative content may be found in books."
It will be very interesting to see books as search results, and mixing various content sources is something that Google intends to do with Google Universal Search or SearchMash.
Related:
The new Google Book Search
Digitizing books without permission
I applaud Mcirosoft's (and google's) efforts to digitize books, libraries, archives and the like. Unfortunately, Microsoft's complete lack of any kind of meaningful index for the books being digitized COMPLETELY NEGATES THE VALUE OF THIS PROJECT!
ReplyDeleteTake a closer look. There is no way to easily BROWSE what has been digitized. Unless you know the name of a specific book to search for (and it must have its copyright expired), you have nothing to input into the search box. If you merely put an asterisk in the book search box, you get a result that says "* 1-4 of thousands." Yikes. Thousands.
How about some kind of a catalogue or table of contents to what is available to take a look at? Now THAT would be interesting.