Go away for a couple of months and everything changes.
On the 23rd of May 2008 Microsoft announced that it was pulling the plug on Live Search Academic and Live Search Books, two products it launched as direct competition for Google Scholar and Google Books respectively.
Though never as widely used as their Google counterparts they were useful products and it is sad to see the work done in digitising 750,000 books and indexing 80,000,000 journal articles disappear from the information retrieval landscape.
In the announcement Satya Nadella, Senior vice president search, portal and advertising at Microsoft states that it is a business decision as they have decided to "focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers". The announcement states that the company does not see a sustainable business model for the services in the current environment.
The existing indexes will be merged into the Live Search engine http://search.live.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment