If future scholarly works show up in Live Search, it won’t be due to any extra work on Microsoft’s part. The company announced it planned to shutter the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, senior vice president for search, portal and advertising at the company, said on the Live Search blog how the current sites would be pulled offline next week.

“Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes,” said Nadella.

The projects digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. “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,” Nadella continued.

Doing this also removes Microsoft from the line of fire regarding the copyrights of published works. By limiting their spidering to content posted by publishers and libraries, the onus of determining proper ownership and rights falls to those who create such repositories.

In contrast, Google has been in hot water with publishers and authors, who allege financial losses will happen from the scanning of books that have been long out of print. Google thinks its book scanning falls under the same kind of fair use that permits it to index websites without seeking the permission of the site owner first.

True algorithmic search may be as effective as it’s going to get for users of major search engines. The top three sites, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, picked up over 94 percent of US search queries in December 2007, according to analytics firm Compete.

Whether one is really better than the other, or even better than sites like Ask.com that trail them, may be a matter of perception. To the academic community, they all fall short.

Intute will open up an expanded index at the end of January, coupling an expanded document set with an approach that complements the algorithmic work with the human touch, according to PhysOrg.

“Google isn’t discriminating about the material it chooses – and with no systematic quality control processes it is very difficult for people to explore and discover trusted information,” Intute executive director Caroline Williams said in the report.

“But automation, combined with human value judgments, can be more responsive and dynamic in meeting the needs of higher and further education.”

Intute’s appeal will be to those doing academic research. Information being added to the project comes mostly from university sources, according to Williams, while various specialists look for more content across the Web to vet and place in the index.

“Google isn’t discriminating about the material it chooses – and with no systematic quality control processes it is very difficult for people to explore and discover trusted information,” said Williams.

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