• by Shankar Gupta , April 12, 2006

MSN late Tuesday night launched "Windows Live Journal"--its answer to Google Scholar, which allows users to search academic journals and databases--and if they have subscriptions, to access and read documents.

At launch, the service will include 4300 journals and material from 2000 conferences, largely on the topics of physics, computer science, and electrical engineering.

Windows Live Academic Search has only one major, general public-focused competitor--Google Scholar, which was released in November 2004. According to Justin Osmer, senior product manager for search with Microsoft, although MSN's academic search product is not first to market, they have secured publishers who will not be included in Google Scholar. "We've certainly taken our time to get this out--but we want to make sure that we're doing it right, and we're doing it right by the publishers," he said. "We've worked out some relationships with some publishers that are not working with Google Scholar, and have chosen not to."

Google did not return calls for comment.

Osmer told OnlineMediaDaily that there were no concrete plans for ad support on the search engine. "It's hard to predict--I don't want to say no, but I don't want to make any promises," he said. "For now, the academic search vertical will not have any advertising in it."