Microsoft takes on Google Scholar

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

> From the Chronicle of Higher Education,  4/12/06
Challenging Google, Microsoft Unveils a Search Tool for Online
Scholarly Articles

By SCOTT CARLSON

Microsoft is introducing a new search tool today that will help 
people find scholarly articles online. The service, which will 
include journal articles from prominent academic societies and 
publishers, puts Microsoft in direct competition with Google, 
which offers a similar service called Google Scholar.

The free search tool, which should work on most browsers, is 
called Windows Live Academic Search. 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 that others cite figures both higher and lower.

Ms. Tiedt pointed out 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 off power searchers, Ms. 
Tiedt said that there is currently 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 [academic] community."

[SNIP]

Copyright 2006, Chronicle of Higher Education