Waiting Impatiently in Searchville

Microsoft announced its beta release of Windows Live Academic, an academic search engine set to compete with Google Scholar. It lets researchers search the contents of academic journals to find abstracts and, if they subscribe to the journals, get the documents from the publishers' sites. From the press release:

The Windows Live Academic Search beta is designed to enable consumers to search through thousands of academic journals, serving as a powerful research aid. Key innovations in the user interface and sorting functionality have been designed to help consumers find information faster and truly give them an advantage in their research efforts.

Inevitably, people have started to make comparisons between Google Scholar and Windows Live Academic. At the moment, Windows Live Academic Search only supports a handful of subjects. Google Scholar has more substance, but, then again, it's been out sixteen months longer. Microsoft's interface is slicker, but Google has the advantage of familiarity.

Academic has one controversial but potentially useful personalization feature: macros, which means users can create tighter, refined searches to get specific results. It's conceivable that professors could create macros to direct their students to specific Web content, or that researchers could create specialized macros to search specific sources. But macros depend on the tech-savvy to build them. In any case, both products are still in beta. It'll be interesting to see how they develop.