Last night, Microsoft announced its beta release of Windows Live Academic Search, an academic search engine set to compete with Google Scholar. From the press release:
The Windows Live Academic Search beta is designed to enable consumers to search through thousands of academic journals, serving as a powerful research aid. Key innovations in the user interface and sorting functionality have been designed to help consumers find information faster and truly give them an advantage in their research efforts.
Ars Technica compares the WLAS to Google Scholar:
One of the advantages of coming to the market second is the ability to learn from what your competition has already done. Microsoft has clearly taken a slicker direction than Google Scholar, which sticks with what is essentially the tried and true Google interface. That’s not a knock on Google, per se, but the initial wow factor is slightly higher on WLAS. Of course, in the long run, usability will probably determine which is more successful.
For the moment, Windows Live Academic Search only supports a handful of subjects. Google Scholar has a little more meat, but it’s been out longer too. In any case, both products are still in beta (which seems to be the perpetual case with Google products in any case), so it will be interesting to see how they develop. I don’t find that I use Google Scholar very often, but I do like their integration with OCLC’s WorldCat, and I’m curious to see if Microsoft will, eventually, offer something similar.
This related article by John MacColl talks about applications such as Google Scholar and what challenges they pose for Academic Libraries, made even more pertinent now with Microsoft in the market as well.