Windows Live Serves Academic Search Beta
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Written By Reprise Media | April 12, 2006 | Share This
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The blogs were buzzing Monday that Microsoft would soon release an academic search feature as part of its Windows Live stew, and sure enough, last night we got a look at Live Academic Search, an effort in cooperation with CrossRef and several publishers. The beta release supports the scholarly research of peer-reviewed journals in just three fields - computer science, electrical engineering and physics - but the press release says they’re working on illuminating more subjects “in the near future.”
Of course it’ll invite inevitable comparisons to Google Scholar, so what’s different? Live Academic’s search results interface has several useful features: a slider to narrow or expand the amount of info presented with results; a pane on the right-hand side that displays an abstract when the mouse is hovered over an article link; the option to re-organize links by author, journal, date, or conference; and built-in citation formats for quickly and easily compiling bibliographies.
By default, results are sorted by relevance, which is determined by how well an article’s text matches the search query, and ‘authoritativenes of the paper,’ which is vaguely defined; we know it doesn’t include citation counts ‘at this time,’ but Microsoft wants to work them in eventually. Gary Price has exhaustive commentary at ResourceShelf, praising some aspects of the service and asking lots of good questions, including one about how often the database is updated and another regarding which volumes and issues of publications are available for scholars - that info isn’t presented on Live Academic Search’s long list of content sources.
Topics: Microsoft |