Does Live Book Search Beat Google?

Today marks the launch of MSN's Live Book Search, a beta offering aimed at giving users an initial taste of what Live Search has to offer in the realm of literary works. The service will perform keyword searches for books that have thus far been scanned in by Microsoft as part of the project.

Google? I decided to compare the two services for myself to find out. For the purposes of the experiment, I settled upon The Iliad by Homer as a satisfactory piece of literature for both search engines to work with. I immediately noticed that Live Book Search offers no advanced search features. This is somewhat frustrating, as The Iliad has been published many times over and I was mainly interested in finding a specific incarnation. Instead, I was left to sift through the search results in a vain effort to track down the version that I wanted to read. Microsoft will take note of these types of features and implement them into future installments of the service. If not, however, I have to assume that Google will grow to dominate the sphere of book search as well. Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Joe is a staff writer for latest ebusiness news.