Microsoft’s scholarly search engine, Live Search Academic, has been available in a beta (trial) version for more than a year. Launched 18 months after Google Scholar, it has a lot of catching up to do in order to make researchers aware of it and want to use it in preference to other search services. To this end, it has expanded the range of articles in its index from computing and physics only, to all disciplines. When it launched in 2006, it contained around 7 million articles; now it contains about 40 million.

Unlike Google Scholar, Live Search Academic content is not scraped remotely from the web, but uses feeds from CrossRef, HighWire, JSTOR, PubMed and others, making it part of the network of connected scholarly information. By so doing, it hopes to have better relevancy in search query returns, because the engine is indexing a regularly updated feed, is flexible and able to adapt immediately to new citation links and taxonomies. Microsoft is also aware that, as the amount of web content grows ever larger, there is a danger that services like Google Scholar will get bogged down with the sheer quantity of information that needs to be signposted. Google Scholar brings academic researchers more results, but Microsoft´s hope is that Live Search Academic results will be more relevant to users.