Object Level Vertical Search & Microsoft Academic Live

Some insights where Microsoft may go with Windows Live Academic.
It sounds more exciting than Google Scholar which there hasnt' been any new enhancements lately.

“For example, in academic search for a researcher, his information may be distributed on different Web sites. We need to collect, extract, and integrate all of this information. On one Web site, we may find the e-mail address of this person. On another Web site, we can find his telephone number and his publications.

“We collect all this information and integrate it. Then, after extraction and integration, the results will be a virtual page containing all the related information about this person.”

“In the vertical domain, people are really interested in information about specific objects, not the pages themselves. For example, if you are a researcher, you always want to find information about other researchers and conferences and journals. If you want to find information about the best researchers in the world, and you use a basic search engine, it’s very difficult to find who the popular researchers are in a particular domain. But using our object-level search engines will specifically give you a list of researchers and extract and integrate the information together. The user can have a much better understanding as a result of a query."

research paper by Wen and Nie who are pioneering this at Microsoft Research Asia