Microsoft Live Books Search beta?
Much like Google Books Search, the Microsoft’s Live Books Search also offers a much overlooked resource for free genealogy searches and free downloadable books in the public domain.
There are a few things Microsoft does better than Google, much as I hate to admit it. They have more accurate OCR conversions that Google Books, from what I’ve seen. And that offers easier cut and paste usage of text from the books, which is a real time saver when using info from these books.
Microsoft offers downloadable PDF files of public domain books that include the text layer so that you can keyword search the files offline and even save the books as text, or just paste parts you want into your databases and web pages.
But Microsoft’s historical offerings are a bit slimmer than Google and the search/web interface is much harder to use to read books online.
And it’s weird, when is the last time you heard anything about Microsoft books? They seemed to get into it as a defensive reaction to Google Books and they’re apparently still working as part of a consortium and are donating public domain books to the Internet Archive project as far as I could tell. I can’t tell if they’re still scanning books.
Try to find Live’s Book Search from the Microsoft Live site. Hello? It’s not even off the More menu like Google hides their books search. It’s not even on the Betas page linked from the More menu. It’s a bit hard to tell if they’re even still actively scanning books, but it’s there, if I search Google for it. Go figure.
It looks like it launched in December 2006 and has had no press since then. And, wow, http://books.live.com gets me there but redirects to a different URL.
But there is content there not found on Google Books and vice versa.
Microsoft’s attention to detail shows. But the interface sucks and it looks like they are hiding it and hoping we’ll forget it’s there less than a year after the beta launched.
At this point it’s still a useful tool and worth doing some genealogy searches on to see what you may find. If you find a useful book download a copy, and get Google Desktop to index it for you so you can search your Microsoft Books locally.
