Windows Academic Search Is Live

Windows Live Academic Search is available in beta. For us — and for most people — it will be “academic” (in the poorest sense of that word) for a while yet, because it’s only drawing on content in computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and “related subject areas.”

I gave it a try with “topic mapping” (not the phrase) and got 5,670 hits. (For some reason “legal research” produced 63 hits, most of which had no apparent relation to the announced subject areas.) When you hover over a hit, an abstract appears in a right-hand panel, though you can choose at any point to view only the list of search results. You can also use a slider to increase or decrease the amount of contextual material that surrounds your hits.

As with other Windows Live searches (web, news, images, local, feeds) it’s all very Web 2.0 with Javascript doing the heavy lifting. So far as I can tell, Windows Live doesn’t degrade gracefully: with Javascript turned off you get nothing.

Has anyone made much use of Windows Live searching generally? Any views as to its utility?