Challenging Google, Microsoft Unveils a Search Tool for Scholarly Articles.

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Author: Carlson, Scott

Microsoft introduced a new search tool last week to help people find scholarly articles online. The service, which includes journal articles from prominent academic societies and publishers, puts Microsoft in direct competition with Google, which offers a similar service called Google Scholar.

The new free search tool, which should work on most Web browsers, is called Windows Live Academic Search (http://academic.live.com). For now, it includes eight million articles from only a few disciplines: computer science, electrical engineering, and physics.

"We will be expanding this over time to cover all the areas where there are scientific journals," said Danielle Tiedt, general manager of content acquisition for Microsoft. "We started in the place where there is the most highly structured metadata, which is these three hard-sciences areas."

People at Microsoft and at other technology companies, such as Google, have seen academic searches as an increasingly valuable sector. Some at Microsoft have estimated that the academic-search business could be worth $10-billion by 2010, although Ms. Tiedt said others cite figures both higher and lower.

Ms. Tiedt said that academic users perform six times as many searches as other people.

"Obviously, getting the power searchers is important to us," she said, adding that an academic-search tool fits into Microsoft's strategy to court the academic community generally.

Despite the potential for making money from power searchers, Ms. Tiedt said there is no business model for Microsoft's academic-search tool. "For us this is really a loyalty game," she said. "We're putting this product out to try to get a lot of loyalty in the community."

Dean Giustini, a librarian at the University of British Columbia who maintains a blog about Google Scholar, was recently invited by Microsoft to see a demonstration of the product before it was publicly available.

Among the tool's strengths, he said, are an interface that can be personalized, and a split screen that can feature lots of information at one time. Among the disappointments he noted is that the search engine has no feature that can track citations, as Google Scholar can.

A search using Windows Live Academic Search will bring up citations of articles. A researcher who clicks on an article's link might get direct access to the full text, if the researcher's computer is covered under a site license that includes the journal in which the article was published.

Other users of the search engine may have to buy access to articles through the publisher.

T.J. Sondermann, a reference librarian at Wheaton College in Massachusetts maintains a different blog about Google Scholar. He predicts that Microsoft might be able to find ways to merge the new search engine with its other products.

For example, a writer might be able to transfer bibliographic information from an article found in Live Academic Search directly into Microsoft Word.

The scholarly organizations that have signed up to work with Microsoft on the new search tool include societies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the Institute of Physics. Also cooperating are major publishers â€" such as the Taylor & Francis Group, Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, the Nature Publishing Group, and John Wiley & Sons â€" and library organizations, including the British Library and OCLC Online Computer Library Center.

Bernard Rous, deputy director of publications for the Association for Computing Machinery, said Microsoft was responsive to publishers' concerns about intellectual-property issues. Critics have complained that Google's book-searching tool, Google Print, disregards copyright protections on many of the books whose texts it plans to digitize so they can be searched.

"It's good to have more than one giant dominating a field and providing a service," Mr. Rous said. "To the extent that someone dominates a field, they can call all the terms."

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By Scott Carlson