Live.com – Microsoft’s search engine will shut down Live Search Books and Live Search Academic. The news came via Satya Nadella, a Senior VP of Search. He wrote on in a blog post that “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,”

So effectively, Live.com does not want to create the content. They want to empower others to do so (probably because it simply isn’t profitable enough).

Interestingly all content with respect to academic articles will now be available in generic searches made by Live users. So quite clearly Microsoft does not see too much potential in creating something specifically for Book Search or Academic Search. It seems like Microsoft seems to be completely changing its orientation with respect to the way it approaches Search. It launched a gimmicky product called CashBack last week which basically pays consumers from buying online items from advertisers on Live.com. A great Sales Promotion Strategy – primarily because Microsoft does not have much to loose – it has a great search product; something that can be compared to Google (as is indeed the case with all its services – or most of them at least). What Google has is a great brand. I think this is a great move by them because it’s a franchise building sales promotion. They will have many cards up their sleeves that will make the user experience great and change people’s opinion of Microsoft. So expect Microsoft’s search market share to increase. But expect it to increase only marginally – mostly from commerce searchers. Commerce searches are a small share of the market – but it’s a start nevertheless. If all searchers were commerce searchers then a brand search engine like Antya would have surpassed Google big time.

With respect to Book Search – I think one thing is extremely clear. Microsoft realises that consumers are not necessarily searching for academic content. Satya writes “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” – the CashBack move is most definitely a move towards delivering value – literally.

With this move by Microsoft, one wonders how long Google will continue with its Google Scholar and Google Books Brand.

Currently there is minimal advertising on both platforms and minimal revenue im assuming. It most definitely is a strategic asset for Google. In the Google Story they write about how this product enables Google to be a starting point for information of all kinds. In the larger scheme of things it seems like Microsoft is making Live lean – something that Google does not need to do (necessarily); so I doubt the Google Scholar and Google Books brands will die anytime soon. 

• http://tinyurl.com/qfr2o2

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