4/19 Addendum - the crew wants to send another shoutout to our fearless leader, Director of Program Management Ramez Naam, who is participating in an afternoon  Webmaster World  Super Session described as "Search Engines and Webmasters: AKA, Search Engine SmackDown! Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask Jeeves."

If he comes back with a new nickname like “the Body” or “The Mezzinator”….we’ll know why. :)

We are pleased to announce the beta release of Windows Live Academic Search (http://academic.live.com).

 Academic search helps users to locate information in academic journal content, and allowing them to complete their research and information gathering work more efficiently. At beta, the index focuses on journal content from the subjects of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Physics – we will be expanding the index to additional subjects soon.

  Key components of this release focus around enabling the user to have more control over their search experience which ideally leads to finding the information the right information faster. 

Key features include:

Preview Pane – Users can preview the full or partial abstract of the individual search results alongside additional metadata about the content.  This helps users determine relevance of the content. 

Sort by – Provides users with additional ways to view and analyze their search results including sort by key metadata elements including – Author, Date of publication, Journal of publication etc.

Citation – To aid users in taking the information they have found and easily incorporating into their research – we have added a citation export feature.  From the preview pane,  you can export the data into BibTEx or Endnote format and incorporate it into your bibliography by simply doing a cut & paste.
 

We are currently working to add Windows Live Search Macros support to Academic search – which will allow you to write your own macros (link to the macro entry on the MSN Search blog)  for academic search, and share it with the community.

 You can find more information about Academic search and the Academic search team on the Windows Live Academic search Blog (http://spaces.msn.com/academicsearch)

--Thiru Anandanpillai, Product Planning

-- Mike Buschman, Program Management

On behalf of the Windows Live Academic Search team

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Note from Ken Moss, General Manager Web Search : "Just a quick update from the Web search team: we’ve turned the speller back on and after making some code adjustments are continuing to do long term reviews to help ensure an outage like last week won’t happen again. The details of what happened fall into an area we can’t discuss for proprietary reasons, so we can’t talk about it as much as we’d like, but wanted to let you know we are continuing to treat search availability and performance as a top goal. Thanks!”

Betsy Aoki's note: I am using this opportunity to horn in on a blog post with an intriguing subject line and announce my presence on the MSN Search blog. While it seems hard to fill  Brady Forrest's shoes (because I think he's at least a men's size 11 and I'm a women's size 8) , the search powers that be over here have asked me to take on the running of this  blog.

This team blog stuff is different than working my own  blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/betsya .  The folks I will be featuring here are the ones in the search  trenches and doing the really cool stuff. 

And now back to your regularly scheduled Jamie Buckley. :)

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On internet search engines, finding the calendar date for a holiday usually takes a few clicks. 

With instant answers, we try to save you time by putting desired information right on the results page.  If you're planning a vacation or looking to stay out of the doghouse with gift buying foresight, type a holiday in MSN Search.  We’ll show current dates along with a short description at the top of the page. 

 Some examples:

Thanksgiving                                                                                                      
Mother’s Day
Martin Luther King day
 We'll be adding some more of these over time.  Please try them out and tell us what you think.

Happy holidays,

Jamie Buckley, PM

Instant Answers Team