Article: Microsoft launches Google Scholar rival

By Doug Payne

Microsoft launches Google Scholar rival
Experts welcome the new entry into academic publishing, but question some of
its potential benefits

[Published 25th April 2006 06:05 PM GMT]

Microsoft has entered the academic search field, launching this month a beta
version of a tool called Windows Live Academic Search, which will index
peer-reviewed subscription content from different publishers. Experts
generally welcomed the new product, which rivals Google Scholar, but
suggested it could pose problems for librarians and commercial vendors.

"The new tool "is a bona fide competitor to Google scholar," Dean Giustini,
a Biomedical Branch Librarian at the University of British Columbia who
blogs about Google Scholar, told The Scientist in an Email.

Free to use, the Microsoft product is targeted to scientists and academic
researchers wanting to find scholarly literature across broad areas of
research. It's currently available only in English, and only in certain
countries, including the US, UK, and Germany. Thirumalai Anandanpillai, of
MSN's Search Product Planning group, said that additional markets will be
added this year, and content will be added throughout the beta period.

The searches will cover content from a range of publishers, including the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Blackwell
Publishing, Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, the British Library, and John
Wiley & Sons Inc. "Our goal is to add content from more publishers on an
ongoing basis," said Anandanpillai. At least initially, Microsoft, which
partnered with the industry association CrossRef, is not using citation
count as a factor in determining relevance. "We utilize Microsoft's Search
algorithms to do the relevance ranking [although] we have not ruled out
using citation-based ranking in the future," Anandanpillai told The
Scientist.

Open access publisher BioMed Central welcomed the new tool, as it did Google
Scholar, which also indexes open access material. "The more the merrier,"
said Mathew Cockerill at BMC, a sister company of The Scientist. "One of the
very positive things about the Internet is the extent to which it stimulates
competition."

Anandanpillai added that the Windows program offers better sorting options
than Google Scholar, allowing users to sort the search results by author,
date of publication, conference in which the paper was presented, and the
journal in which it was published. Academic Search also offers a feature
that allows users to automatically derive citations to a paper that appears
on the search results page.

Full Text at TheScientist
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23346/

Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/

Windows Live Academic Search
http://academic.live.com/

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


.