Tonight Microsoft is launching another one of the products being kicked around and shown to the Search Champs v4 that I attended: Windows Live Academic search.

screenshot by Kevin Briody

Academic search:

… enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the web in locations like citeseer. Academic search works with libraries and institutions to search and provide access to subscription content for their members.

According to an email by Kevin Briody from Microsoft not under NDA, Academic search has “upwards of 6 million records in the database.”

Kevin also describes the process which is basically you search for something academic related, then a results window will appear on the right with: Title, abstract, author, journal, author(s), publisher and DOI, Digital Object Identifier. If you want to view the article you click on the title. The publisher will check your IP address and know whether you are a member or subscriber. If the institution is a subscriber then you’ll be sent the full text. If you don’t belong to an organization that subscribes then you’ll be given a buy option.

As I’ve written here before, I like the idea of these specialized search engines. Yahoo has done a particularly good job doing these niche engines. I’m curious in reading what folks interested in using this type of search think. It isn’t quite live as I publish this but the message we received was it would be going live “around 9pm PST.” Maybe as you read this.

What do you think?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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