Showing posts with label windows live. Show all posts
Showing posts with label windows live. Show all posts

12 April 2006

Windows Live Academic Search Goes Live

Microsoft has rolled out the first beta of its academic search engine. It has some nice Web 2.0-y features that make it look far cooler than Google Scholar (Google, are you listening?). One of the FAQs made me smile:

What about open source repositories? Do you have content from them in your index?

Academic search has implemented the Open Architecture Initiative (OAI) protocol for indexing OAI-compliant repositories. For example, we indexed the content present in ArXiv.org for the launch. We will continue to index more repositories after the launch.

I don't know of anybody except Microsoft that calls these OAI repositories "open source": you don't think that Microsoft's hung up on something?

Another FAQ talks about something new to me: the OpenURL. This turns out to be a wonderful piece of Orwellian double-speak, since it is a way of ensuring that people only get to see the content they are "entitled" to - that is, have paid for. In other words, OpenURL is all about closing off your options.