Dean Giustini of UBC Google Scholar Blog has a two part series about his trip to Microsoft to have a look at and discuss Microsoft Academic Search.

First in Why Titans Like Microsoft Want to Talk to Librarians, Giustini writes about how a group of librarians, information professionals and publishers were asked to review Microsoft's Academic Search. Why would Microsoft want to talk to librarians? According Giustini, Microsoft understands that librarians "know search," and they were interested in our opinions.

Second in Critiquing Microsoft Live "Academic Search", Giustini gives us some insights into the product (some of which are already reported in PC World) and lists positives and negatives to Academic Search and provides some comparisons to Google Scholar.

Positives (for details go to UBC Scholar Blog)

1. Personalization
2. Split screen format
3. "Smart" scrolling
4. Slider
5. Citation importing
6. Index coverage
7. Document ordering

Negatives (for details go to UBC Scholar Blog)

1. No citation/cited by searching
2. No advanced search
3. No subject channel search
4. No field search
5. No visible/viewable history
6. Canadian content

It will be interesting when this is released how it will compare to Google Scholar and as Giustini mentions what it might mean for the future of commercial databases like Dialog, Ovid, EBSCO, etc.