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Microsoft Releases Book Search
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft is releasing its Live Search Books, a rival to Google's Book Search, in test, or beta, version in the US.
The digital archive will include books from the collections of the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto.
Books from three other institutions will be added in January 2007.
All the books currently included in the project will be non-copyrighted but later it will also add copyrighted work that publishers have given permission to include in the project."
Publisher information for adding content to Windows Live Book Search through the Windows Live Book Search Publisher Program can be found here: http://publisher.live.com/
And you mean that Linux (an Unix CLONE!!!!!) is better in originality? For crying out loud :-)
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Anyone remember print.google.com?
I'm waiting for google to buy a huge book publisher next, put the whole catalog up, and sell ads..
..don't panic
I see some sort of strategy here - something very similar to what MSFT adopted against Apple, very succesfully - Building something that is cheaper, virtually the same - almost.
But the same rules may not apply in the world of online tools. Where GOOG is actually borrowing content to attract their actual product (i.e the users) whom them can then sell to customers (i,e advertisers) - Microsoft doesn't seem to have such a clear cut monetization plan from the looks of it. Seems to be more a case of dump enough money to smother the competitor approach, which I doubt will work with Google today.
I for one, would be more scared of Amazon and other publishers rather than such a half-hearted (peanut butter) effort by MSFT.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
This is, and always has been, microsofts MO, it's nothing new.
They never move into a market unless someone is already there.
It's the same mentality as long distance runners not taking the lead/avoiding it until the race is almost over. let the other runners have all the problems keeping ahead, then move in at the end.
It doesn't seem to be working against google though, interesting that.
And we'll see a 'Microsoft officially aproved' Linux real soon, called SUSE SP1.
3 larger universities in Sweden (the one I work for is one of them) are about to add theyselve to MS Live Search book program. They are in the talking at this moment. This will give the project access to 30000+ volumes of books/researchs in scientific and humanitary fields.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I wonder if "Microsoft Innovation - Volumes 1-12" are going to make it into the index
What a wasted duplication of effort. I'd rather have both companies get together and make one good product for all of us to use at either half the cost, or twice the breadth and quality.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I seriously think that people reading Slashdot know what "beta" means. Especially considering the "tagging beta" phrase that appears below every article summary. You can just say "beta" next time. Thanks.
"Anything you can do, I can do better .... "
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Please Microsoft, do something new that's not copying Apple and Google.
Let's all now go look at Google Labs and predict the next 12 Microsoft products....
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And we'll see a 'Microsoft officially aproved' Linux real soon, called SUSE SP1.
:)
But everyone knows you don't actually use it until SP2
Isn't Google already free? Hard to be cheaper than that -- unless MS is going to pay me to use their service.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
but when is MS going to actually release something *new*? how about skipping book search and taking a risk with something that google hasn't already done?
for example, i think their efforts on XNA game studio are of they type they should do more often: it leverages their core strengths (dev tools and 3d graphics), takes advantage of existing products with wide install bases (yes, duh..windows - but i really mean directx) and is INTERESTING and EXCITING and something GOOGLE CAN'T MATCH NEXT WEEK.
You could call windows a DOS clone. Linux isn't a unix clone, they are seperate systems. Operating systems work differently but come up with an end product, which is a platform desktop and web apps can run on. Thats where the real diversity starts, but perhaps not in this case. I'm quite sick of MS calling itself inovative and leeching off other peoples good work.
But then all the runners would end up slowing down to a walk and not get anywhere...I suppose that's sort of how that weird Olympic bike racing works though.
Look at their Microsoft Office Live Basics. It is much worse than many small free open source packages. They depend on they can give every thing free (for a short time): domain names, hostings, etc. I initially wanted to use it for www.mathpotd.org (Math Problem of the Day) and I found I couldn't do anything with it. Now you see www.mathpotd.com is being redirected to www.mathpotd.org -- even the redirection cannot be done nicely -- very ugly.
not the leading bunch, have you not watched long distance runners? Or the tour de france leading group? (they have a word for it, buggered if I can recall it though).
If Microsoft is so dedicated to online books and thinks it's such a great idea, I wonder why they didn't contribute to an already well-established site, like The Gutenberg Project which got its start back in 1971.
Is this what they call embrace and extend?
Well, a market normally doesn't even exist unless there's already someone there. But I acknowledge they've started very few new markets. Visual (as in Studio) tools, perhaps?
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Well, lots of people pay Google for a privilege: that of their ads being shown on the service. It's how Google makes money. So Live could make advertisers pay less (or more efficiently, which amounts to pretty much the same, but is much more interesting and difficult to do) for ads.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
I once worked for Wang Labs circa 1990, and I noticed that many of the things Wang did seemed quite inexplicable... until you considered IBM. Then the pattern became clear. Whatever IBM did, Wang tended to do something similar six months to a year later.
1984, IBM acquires Rolm. Much press ink spilled about how IBM is about to become a leader in the combined computer-telecommunications industry. Shortly thereafter Wang acquires an communications company called Intecom. 1988, IBM spits out Rolm. It appears the combined communications-telecommunications industry ain't gonna happen. Shortly thereafter Wang sells off Intecom.
1986, IBM introduces the PC Convertible, a sorta-kinda-clunky laptop that was almost IBM PC compatible. Shortly thereafter Wang introduces a clunky laptop. IBM discontinues the not-very-successful Convertible (and does not introduce another laptop for a long time) Wang discontinues there.
Wang at that time appeared to be utterly incapable of evaluating any idea in its own right. Ideas were not considered viable until it could be seen that a competitor was already doing them.
Microsoft now seems to be very much in the same mold. Apple has an MP3 player? Good, let's have an MP3 player. Google has a book search? Good, let's have a book search.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
they probably will only offer Trusted-Reading. fahrenheit 451 style
Does this mean I can finally read Bill Gates' book, "The Road Ahead" for free? :p
You can see Microsoft Research's Innovation hard at work here. Same thing goes for the XBox, Zune, IE, Word, DOS, Windows,
Well, they certainly don't do it to skimp on R&D.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
drafting, in motor sports it reduces drag. in running, its more of a mental thing. its tougher to gauge your pace when your leading the pack, and you can just settle in behind and then out kick him at the end.
Peloton
I'm working on the 100 greatest books list and trying to read them comprehensively not just to say I did it. I'm not a disciplined or fast reader and I probably only get through 5-10 fiction books a year, so I spend a lot of time rereading sections I can't interpret. I spent about 30 minutes sifting through War and Peace one night trying to find the passage "God, death, love, brotherhood of man." For those of us looking for these kinds of passages or favorite quotes, this is awesome.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
of course, silly me
was that not a response to Borlands visual toolset?
I know they ripped the guts of the development team from Borland, taking the guy who designed it in the first place, but I don't know who started the visual dev thing.
It's a shame about Delphi, I really liked that.
Linux is a Unix clone...really, get over it and accept it. Linux IS a variation of Unix.
If you want to show anger towards linux, I recommend choosing a different path than complaining about it being built to standards like Posix and SUS.
Disagree with me? Tell me why, but follow these rules.
If you want to show anger towards linux, I recommend choosing a different path than complaining about it being built to standards like Posix and SUS.
You can make something POSIX-compliant without it looking like UNIX. Look Windows, for example.
I have a vague memory of reading some research some years ago that indicated there was a measurable reduction in air resistance even for runners. I may be misremembering, though (perhaps playing with too many virtual cameras), or maybe it's been disproved.
They've done this WindowsCE, to some degree of success. SinCE WinCE started, approx 7 years ago, they've been making a huge loss -- spending far more than the revenue form WInCE licenses. Other players actually have to live off their revenues, so they tend to pass out from hunger.
They've done this with IE. Now they're trying to do this to Google.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
> Very few companies make anything really "new"
Agreed. There's a lot of obvious things that nonetheless are patented by the very incompetent USPTO (btw, is there a mandate to accept anything as a valid patent, for the glory of Uncle Sam?).
> and normally the first kid on the block with a new technology is the first one to get knocked off the block.
Though this is a reality of life, this is not cool. And has nothing to do with this discussion. The fact is the OP is right, looks like Microsoft simply copied Google.
Maybe Microsoft Research really means Microsoft _Marketing_ Research...
> And I just love the Linux shrills out there... how innovative is it to copy unix really?
Do you think we bought a "Quick and Dirty Unix" for Torvalds to rebrand it as Linux? Yeah, because Microsoft did buy a QDOS which ended up being MS-DOS.
Stallman et al were so succesful in creating GNU that many Unices (e.g. Solaris) run these free utilities in professional sites (I've seen it); also the Linux kernel was coded by many people. What ant-like reasoning would make lots of folks be able to reproduce any other piece of code? Oh, I see, "maybe" Torvalds invented all those posts, patches and contributions which took years, just to produce a copy of what -- which one would he copy: Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, A/IX... which one?
This is how innovative Linux is: its coders _know_ what they're doing. This is working in a very complex environment, with worldwide interactions.
Now contrast this with a bunch of jerks of _one_ nationality, working in a single place, under a central coordination (well, ok, this is debatable) and yet having to rewrite previous work (which therefore seems lacking) and, on top of that, taking a lot of years at a high cost to redo just the same thing they already had with improvements others (like Apple, Google, Opera) pioneered.
If I were this lame, I'd quit and try a position in another really innovative company, like e.g. Google -- wait a minute, they are indeed doing this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At least not in Opera, all it displays is a blank window after searching.
Good job Microsoft!
I've been hearing about this new service for a bit, and the *great* thing that I'm hearing is a severe lack of complaining. The news media isn't making a stink about this, because Microsoft is making a concerted effort to start with only out-of-copyright books. This is the first step, and it's a step that Google should have done correctly.
Note also that this MS product, while I don't think it's quite as easy to navigate as Google's, is very specifically about putting books online, and giving them to anyone that wants them. No "previews." No gimmicks. Just books. Sure, they call it Book Search, but once you find the book, there's a link to "Download The Entire Book" in pdf format.
Google dropped the ball on their archive by choosing to focus on the wrong challenges. MS is saying "Well, if you won't fix it; we sure will." For this, interestingly, I applaud them.
- DaftShadow
PageRank, published in 1998, is an application of eigenvector centrality.
/. to a rather nice overview earlier today; it's worth reading.)
HITS ("hubs and authorities") is another eigenvector-based method of ranking nodes in a network, also published in 1998 (in this case by Jon Kleinberg).
Eigenvector centrality itself was proposed as early as 1949 (Seeley, "The net of reciprocal influence") as a means of ranking nodes in a network. There were plenty of papers on this topic in the intervening 49 years. (The concept of eigenvectors, of course, is considerably older than this.)
[moranar] "I wouldn't call PageRank a "simple tweak" of anything."
No offense intended, but how much do you know about the details of how PageRank works? (There was a link on
The specific difference that PageRank has from standard eigenvector centrality is the addition of 'virtual edges' from each node to each other node, which are collectively traversed with probability beta (a parameter of the model), which does two things:
(1) it gives the algorithm something reasonable to do in the case where it runs into a sink (node with no outgoing edges)
(2) it supplies a way of "smoothing" the rank values over the network according to the value of beta.
That's it. Personally, I consider this a relatively "simple tweak".
Credit where due: it was clever of Page and Brin to apply it to the web graph because of the particular semantics of hyperlinks, but as Kleinberg's simultaneous publication suggests, it's a pretty obvious thing to try to use the information inherent in the hyperlinks.
Furthermore, it's worth noting that the reason pure PageRank worked so well initially is that noone who was creating web pages at the time was thinking "hey, let's boost our rankings by manipulating our link structure!". At the time, SEO consisted of inserting bogus text on your web pages, because textual similarity was where it was at. The use of hyperlink information, which was totally orthogonal, revolutionized web search precisely because no one had tried to game the system in that way yet. Now that such gaming is commonplace, either PageRank or the underlying interpretation of the hyperlink data (probably both, I'd guess) has been radically modified from the original algorithm.
As to whether this is an innovation "in Computer Science", this isn't really computer science, as such: it's (applied) mathematics. (This is coming from someone who has degrees in each of them.) Google does a lot of computer science in the context of implementing its methods, refining them to take account of additional information (e.g. adjusting the transition probabilities according to the anchor text content), and most especially in scaling them to the web, but the original method is just applying a known mathematical operator.
Can anyone suggest a single thing that Microsoft has done in the last few years that could be described (loosely) as innovative from the point of view of the end users of their products? By that I would exclude things like the .NET platform, which Joe Sixpack knows nothing about.
Is it Clippy? Might it be the Strip in the new Office? It surely is not Book Search, the Zune or IE7... I'm really struggling here, yet they are one of the largest corporations on earth. Something is seriously wrong with Microsoft.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
nice going on innovation microsoft.. hey lets play catch up in the game of follow the leader.
Wait ... but when MS makes something strictly to a standard then they're ... "a copycat"? And when they're making something to a standard but then improve on it then it's "embrace, extend, control"? And if they do something that's completely different from any existing standard people moan how non-standard MS products are? So what exactly are they supposed to do?
One day I'd like to hear one of you folks tell me what exactly you'd want MS to do that wouldn't make you whine about it reflexively...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
This blows away what Google is doing.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Google has Google Earth & SketchUp - its an amazing 3D world, Apple has iLife with movies, music & podcasts...
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
They pay Google because that's where the stuff they want to buy (eyeballs) are. Cheaper ads don't make a lick of difference if no one is looking at them.
Which is where my other phrase, "more efficiently" comes into play. I acknowledge a "normal" IT startup would have problems running against Google. It's not that Microsoft doesn't have them, it's the sheer amount of money it has to face them. They also have name recognition, which -surprisingly- they don't use this time: going to live.com shows they don't attach a "Microsoft" to the service, as they usually do. OK, they put a Windows this time, but it's not exactly the same (it actually should be "Microsoft Windows Live", shame on them).
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
I wonder why no book publisher has come forward to complain about this deal?
They did when Google came out with it. Why not now? Is it because Google is a higher profile target for them?
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