Microsoft Jumps on the Book Indexing Bandwagon

Microsoft has announced that they're going to launch MSN Book Search. It'll launch next year. In conjunction with that, MSN has announced its intention to join the Open Content Alliance, which would align them with Yahoo, etc.

(You know this reminds me of? The beginning of a Risk game where you're deciding what countries you want and placing all your armies.)

A couple of quotes from the press release: "MSN will first make available books that are in the public domain and is working with the Internet Archive ( http://www.archive.org ) to digitize the material. MSN will then work to extend its offering to other types of offline content."

There are so many other types of offline content that would benefit from this. Census and other genealogy-related records. Government publications and records. Out of copyright periodicals.

Rankle: "MSN Book Search will help address the fact that over 50 percent of people's online queries go unanswered today on search engines, according to internal Microsoft(R) research." Peh. This statement presupposes that the questions that are going unanswered will be found in public domain books, which I'm not sure is true. (I'm not even sure that they're going to "help".) And if that is true, how come there still isn't anybody who's coming forward to work with the masses of old books which have already been digitized and made available online? Cornell alone has done massive amounts with mathematics and home economics books. Why are all the digitzation initiatives starting over and reinventing the wheel? WHY?

I'm sure that these folks have the best intentions in mind. Even so these declarations and big plans remind me, uncomfortably, of 1998. And the questions they generate remind me of a soap opera. Can MSN and Yahoo work together within the Open Content Alliance? Will Google be isolated and marginalized over this one issue? (Seems unlikely.) Is Ask Jeeves destined to become the Switzerland of online content generation? Will the smaller search engines be swallowed up or will they take stances? The OCA's open to everybody, isn't it?

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