Windows Live Academic Search Blog

We are pleased to announce the beta release of our Academic search engine (http://academic.live.com). This is the first release of our Academic search efforts, and represents many months of work by the Windows Live Academic Search team with collaboration from many across the industry including publishing partners, librarians, and more importantly, customers. Please use it, and let us know what you think and what you’d like to see in the product moving forward.   

We intend for this blog to be a communication/collaboration channel with people interested in the academic search space, and you can expect to see members of our team, and guests from our partner institutions contribute to this blog. 

While developing the product, we undertook significant efforts to understand the information seeking needs of users in this space, and collaborated with experts in the library world, with publishers (both commercial as well as non-profit societies) and with industry associations (e.g. Crossref). We are thankful for the great ideas and debates we had with our collaborators, and we look forward to continuing the collaboration. 

Below are some outcomes of our conversations with users and others across the industry:

• Users wanted to have more information about a search results before clicking on the link and leaving their search results page. So we built in the preview pane functionality, where we show full or partial abstracts as you mouse over in the results pane
• Users told us they wanted to have tools that allowed them to sort search results on a variety of criteria. So we built a sort by function to support this functionality
• Users said they utilize search engines to find information in the context of some task they are performing and that they needed search to complement what they were trying to achieve… so we built features to address this – including support for citation export, (BibTex/Endnote) which is accessible from the preview pane 
• Users said that they wanted more control over the search results. So we leveraged the Windows Live platform to provide macro functionality in Academic search – using this functionality, users will be able to create and share macros that provide custom search results – e.g. a professor can create a macro that searches only through a set of journals pertinent to his/her class, and share it with the students. This feature will be available in a few weeks, and we will post details at that time. 

From a content perspective, we focused first on the subjects of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Physics – and we have plans to expand this coverage.  Tell us what subject areas matter most to you, and we will add more subject areas in the following weeks and months. 

This post is getting long – we will stop, for now.

Thiru Anandanpillai, Product Planning

Mike Buschman, Program Management

On behalf of the Windows Live Academic search team