Microsoft is revisiting a feature that was first developed nearly a decade ago. The company has launched a new Microsoft Academic search service that is powered by Bing. As the name suggests, the platform allows users to track academic content and create a search-based feed. Microsoft Academic is now available in preview.
Some of you may remember the previous Microsoft Academic Search services. The company was developing the project but decided to abandon it in 2012.
With that in mind, the official name of the new service is Microsoft Academic 2.0. By using Bing, the service can deliver academic-based search results that are workable within a modern web browser. By conducting searches, users can see information from schools, journals, studies, conferences, lectures, and authors.
Among the most interesting aspects of Academic 2.0 is the ability to create a customized feed. Microsoft explains how the service works:
“This new service puts a knowledge driven, semantic inference based search and recommendation framework front and center. In addition, a new data structure and graph engine have been developed to facilitate the real-time intent recognition and knowledge serving.
One illustrating feature is semantic query suggestions that identify authors, topics, journals, conferences, etc., as you type and offer ways to refine your search based on the data in the underlying academic knowledge graph. You can also refine your results using the filters on the search results page.”
How it Works
As you can see in the screenshot above, a quick search reveals results as a normal Bing search might. Of course, these results are tailored to academic and research purposes.
Users can narrow results further by selecting subcategories based on author, affiliation, field of study, and other options on the side menu.
Clicking one of the search results will bring up a relevant paper on the subject matter.
