Microsoft Corp. announced its decision to pull the plug on two of its projects, the Live Search Books and the Live Search Academic.

The plan involved an effort to scan whole libraries and offer the books’ content over the internet and also to archive numerous academic journals.

According to Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search and advertising group, who explained the company’s decision in a blog post yesterday, the two activities no longer fit the company’s search operation strategy and from now on Microsoft will focus its efforts on a series of verticals with a high commercial intent.

"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," Nadella said, according to the Associated Press.

The two web sites will be taken down next week and from that moment on, Live Search will guide the people searching for books to non-Microsoft sites.

Even after its many attempts to boost its popularity, Microsoft’s search engine trails third, with competitors like Google and Yahoo gathering a large procentage of the number of queries performed each month.

Live Search Books contains 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles and Microsoft explained that this content will continue to be integrated into Live Search results, but the separate indexes will be taken down.

Microsoft began its work in the book-scanning business three years ago and released its Live Search Books in December 2006 as a response to Google’s Book Search service.