MACs Re: Microsoft takes on Google Scholar

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

Don't be misled by the name-- "Windows Live Academic Search."

At least the beta works on Macintosh as well, using System 
10.4,with Safari as the browser. (Other permutations not tested, 
and I do not know about this for the new Intel Macs.)

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
and formerly
Princeton University Library

dgoodman@liu.edu
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>
Date: Thursday, April 13, 2006 8:08 pm
Subject: Microsoft takes on Google Scholar
To: liblicense-l@lists.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