Microsoft Academic Search and challenging future for A&I vendors

Ok, we knew that Microsoft was coming with something similar to Google Scholar and now it seems that it will be launched on April 11. via Dean Giustini

I don't know if anyone from Elsevier was invited to Redmond to get a peak. It will be interesting to see what would be the uniqueness of Micorosft Academic Search compared to Google Scholar. Definetly we don't need another mee-too products. Eventhough Google does not find useful, I hope that Microsoft Academic Search team implements a refinement of search results by clustering or some other way.

And in the bibliographic database vendors land Tuesday will be another day when CEOs, product and strategy people, marketing and sales departments will be talking on "where we go now? how many more years we can stay just as an A&I vendor........"

I believe having Microsoft and Google (who knows in the future may be Yahoo and Ask now that Gary Price is with Ask) in scholary research is a great challenge for all the A&I vendors (Elsevier, Thomson, CSA, OVID etc) and it makes my job more fun when I am competing with some of the best minds and innovative companies.

To differentiate our products from Microsoft and Google's free products, we all need to use our creativity and start providing intelligence and insights with our content, leverage our existing taxonomies and invest more in conceptual indexing, better anticipate users needs, personalize the search results and provide answers to the users, connect our users to each other and their extended network, make the interfaces more interactive like a game console, have users interact with our systems, and even provide APIs and have them create their own portals with our data ......................

(check this team's information portal for Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution they definetly deserve an award from SIIA or any other organization that you may think of) .That's one of the most innovative vertical search portal that you can get!