Windows Live Academic & What's lacking in Web Search: Interactivity and Context

I was in London with the family for the holiday visiting the in-laws and did not need the s-chip . I did not even check my emails for 5 days. One thing that I did is to check Windows Live Academic but that lasted few minutes for I was not impressed at all contrary to Ian McAllister whom I always enjoy reading his blog and learning from him. I can't understand why they haven't implemented clustering as they are doing at their beta site. May be I should direct this question to Danielle Tiedt. I believe that if they want they can really improve this service and really come with a superb product like Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution portal. One suggestion to WLA team is not try to cath-up to Google Scholar. Try to do something better than GS, or even better than what we the fee based services are offering. WLA team you have the data from CrossReff and the best talents to develop such a product to give us a real competition...

Microsoft Academic Research (and Google Scholar) are missing some of the the following points that Marti Hearst presented at Sigir 2000 on what's lacking in Web Search. I think Engineering Village, Scopus and Web of Science and CSA are doing much better on these points.












A key point for me with Microsoft Academic Research was some of the Elsevier's content was indexed. It would be very interesting to see the results of this in the usage of our journal content. My bet that this would help increase our usage and I am all for having all our journals being indexed by Microsoft.

And in terms of the future of A&I business: the situation is serious but not hopeless. (this is basically what I used to say to my college buddy when we were taking a very challenging final exam)

Here is an interesting post on Windows Live Academic and Google Scholar from Dan Cohen
and a nice overview of WLA from Barbara Quint including comments from Anurag Acharya, developer of Google Scholar, Sharon Mombru, senior product manager of Scirus at Elsevier, Jill O’Neill, director of planning and communications for NFAIS, Craig Van Dyck, a vice president at John Wiley & Sons