Windows Academic Search wins hearts

Microsoft has announced Windows Live Academic Search (WLAS), a competitor to Google Scholar , the academic search tool that has met with sizeable resistance from the publishing industry.

The Microsoft offering, however, has been warnly welcomed, and Microsoft's marketing machine has moved to heighten the differences between the two offerings in terms of their reception by established players.

Launched with the co-operation of linking specialist CrossRef , and several major academic publishers, WLAS enables users to search content from 4,300 journals. Currently in beta format, WLAS links to information on computer science, electrical engineering and physics. The service is currently free, but a Microsoft spokesperson said: “We may implement advertisements.”

The pilot will run for a year, said Marika Westra, an Elsevier company spokesperson. Elsevier is allowing access to 400 journals for the project. “The objective is to see how a web search engine like this can drive people to our material,” she said.

Wiley is similarly letting 400 journals be accessed. “It’s important to participate in this kind of project, all of us [in publishing] are scratching the surface of the functionality the web can provide,” said Craig Van Dyck, operations VP for STM publishing at John Wiley & Sons .

Unlike Google Scholar, WLAS does not search the open web. Instead WLAS displays a preview pane containing abstracts of the relevant books and articles. Links resolve directly to the publisher’s version of the article. A Microsoft spokesperson said: “WLAS fully understands the value of publishers and their importance in the content value chain.”

WLAS, which is part of Windows Live, Microsoft’s new range of internet services, is not a competitor to paid-for services, said Amy Brand, director of business development at CrossRef.

“WLAS is general academic search, which is quite different from specialised subject portals and A&I services. Users turn to a general search interface when they are trying to locate something they already know about, and as a way of exploring fields they may have less of an expertise in.”

Instead of using citation counts as a relevance indicator, WLAS ranks relevance according to two criteria: the degree of match between the search term and the content of the paper, and the authority of the paper.

Microsoft is committed to the long-term development of WLAS, telling IWR, "Academia is a strategic market, we hope to gain loyalty that will extend to the search service that they use outside of their work efforts as well. Our game here is about the search ecosystem rather than the product in isolation."

“We have received dozens of inquiries already from publishers who want to be indexed in WLAS, so we know that its coverage will expand rapidly,” said Brand.

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