In Microsoft vs. Google, search is true prize

By Raissa Kasolowsky

LONDON (Reuters) - A good place to see the true frontline in Microsoft's battle with Google is deep in the bowels of the British Library in London.

In a room under the library's red brick building near St Pancras railway station, a Microsoft-funded team is working 14 hours a day to scan shelf upon shelf of books.

Launched a year ago, the project will scan 25 million carefully preserved pages of the British Library's 19th-century archive, around 100,000 books, over the next two years. Together with collections from other libraries including Yale and Cornell University, the pages are destined for Live Search Books, Microsoft's answer to Google Book Search.

It's a field where Microsoft is playing catch-up with Google, whose mass digitization project already has around one million books online, 10,000 publishers and almost 30 major world libraries on board.

If the inventor of the PC operating system's recent bid for Yahoo is an effort to glean more online advertising, this painstaking copying points to a deeper flaw behind the weakness in advertising: search.

"When we are able to do a better job of answering people's questions we are going to build loyalty and then ultimately increase the size of our user community," said Cliff Guren, Microsoft Director of Publisher Evangelism, a title the company hopes will attract libraries and publishers to its scheme.

"By doing this we increase our query share which helps us increase our advertising rates and that's how our business makes money," he said. Query share is the percentage of individual consumer Web search requests attracted by services like Google and Microsoft.

Internet audience measurement firm comScore estimates only 4 percent of Internet searches worldwide use Microsoft's engine, against 77 percent through Google's. Yahoo, the second-largest Web search provider, has a 16 percent share.