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Microsoft has announced that they are closing their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Projects. While they will still index books and scholarly publications in their primary search index, Microsoft’s digitization initiatives will come to an end.

Libraries and publishers are encouraged to build digital archives utilizing the platform Microsoft built with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others.

Commenting on the future of the search business, Satya Nadella Senior vice president search, portal and advertising, wrote on the Live Search blog, “Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner.”

What do you think about Microsoft’s move to end their Live Search Books and Academic Projects? Let us know in the comments.

With limited options, Yahoo board members face increased pressure to accept Microsoft’s hostile bid. Yahoo has resisted Microsoft’s advances in the past, convincing shareholders a turnaround was just around the corner.

So how much money did Yahoo leave on the table by declining the earlier offer? Microsoft won’t publicly reveal the bid. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang would be loath to share the offer from the company the Valley loves to loathe.

Here’s the rumored Microsoft bid made last year: $40 plus per share. That’s the number Oppenheimer analyst Sandeep Aggarwal cited in a note to clients, suggesting a potential 26-40 percent upside for investors from the current offer of $31 per share - if Yahoo can negotiate a better deal for its shareholders or find a more suitable suitor.

So who’s willing - besides Google - to play white knight to Yahoo’s digital damsel in distress?

The knights hardly comprise a round table. Only five companies have been widely reported as possible suitors: AT&T, Comcast, News Corp, Time Warner, and Verizon Communications. None has stepped up to enter the fray. Rupert Murcoch of News Corp publicly stated he didn’t plan to prepare a competitive bid.

The Wall St. Journal (subscription) reported this morning that Yahoo’s hoping against hope that a rival bidder or a business tie-up with Google would save the day. Google desperately wants to derail the deal, even though their share of searches continue to erode Yahoo’s market share.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch expects shareholders to approve the deal soon.

A Google-Yahoo partnership, though, isn’t an ideal solution for Yahoo either. It’s not as if Google could sign a noncompete agreement with Yahoo in lines of business Yahoo has strength in: local mobile, e-mail, display advertising, or e-mail.

How much revenue Google would be willing to forego by partnering with Yahoo in search also remains in question. In its quest to index the world’s information, Google has become a victim of its own success.

A grizzly bear hug (not even a teddy bear hug) from Ballmer may have squeezed the life from Silcon Valley’s once and future king.

Now it seems Google’s mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of Yahoo’s search business will be the only hope for Yahoo’s survival.

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:
From the SEW Blog:

Who’s Google Taking On with Knols?It seems Google’s goal with Knol is to take back some of the traffic that Wikipedia is [...]

It seems that, at least once a week, some important person has been leaving some major search company.  Unique article intros are getting hard to come by.  For both her sake and ours, then, we’re happy to hear that Brandon Holley, the former editor of Jane magazine, has begun work at Yahoo.
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More: continued [...]

If becoming a search apprentice is one key to learning, how does one become an apprentice in search marketing? In today’s Search Ads column, “Search Marketing Skills: Tips, No Tricks,” Matt Spiegel shares the most important skills needed to break into the search business.

More: continued here
sew experts search marketing skills tips no tricksRate [...]

A number of the leading online news publishers are looking to organize greater control over how and what news of theirs gets listed in the search results of the various search engines, according to a report by the Associated Press.
“Currently, Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other top search companies voluntarily respect a Web site’s [...]

Searches are up all over the world, and it’s an interesting juxtaposition to think of the rest of the world as “emerging” compared to North America and Europe. In today’s Searching for Meaning column, “Understanding the Global Search Marketplace - Part 2,” Kevin Ryan looks at some global search data provided by comScore to see [...]

Search Server 2008 Express arrived as a free download from Microsoft, which launched the release candidate during a California conference.The Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose saw Microsoft debut its entrant into free enterprise search products. Search Server Express 2008 provides another choice for the business environment and its search needs, competing with IBM [...]

When it comes to green search companies, you might think of Google as the winner, and Yahoo, as (almost) always, as the runner-up.  But with the launch of a new site called MSN Green, Microsoft’s trying to keep up with the pack.
“Green,” in this case, might be the color of envy, not a healthy environment; [...]

Google’s a bit of a mystery to many marketers; how does a company rise to the position Google is in within the advertising industry without doing much advertising themselves?This AP article goes into detail about how little Google spends on advertising compared to giant competitors like Microsoft and eBay, but neglects that Google does focus [...]