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The service, which for now focuses on computer science, electrical engineering and physics, includes tools for researchers, such as the ability to quickly extract information for citations
Full Story [seattlepi.nwsource.com]
Among other things, Microsoft's service is unique in indexing a selection of journals from academic publishing powerhouse Reed Elsevier, she said.
Windows Live Academic Search [academic.live.com]
Academics with access to academic and niche databases already have free, searchable article databases.
Not sure any lay-person would really be that interested in searching lengthy and convuluted academic articles for fun. If they would they would know how to do it already.
Google Scholar returns some studies of Melville with "ishmael" in the title. Windows Academic doesn't yet have a large enough index to really manage that. "Call me e-mail" is the closest it comes. Regular Google at least digs deeply enough that it finds the quote in Wikipedia.
Maybe I should be using Google Library, but there's no navigation to it from Google Scholar. Hmmmm.... call me a help file.
And some days later, WLAS isn't any faster, or more comprehensive.
There must be some inherent difficulty with indexing and organizing quotes.
I think it's more a problem with famous quotes.
Try this Google search...
when in the course of human events [google.com]
Many books about the Declaration of Independence.... not many high ranking returns for the Declaration itself, and I don't think I would have found it in the top 10 had someone not quoted it in their page title.
I tried Advanced Searching "in the text of the page," which changed things slightly, but not much.
But, if I search for this obscure quote from the list of objections to King George further down in the Declaration...
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone [google.com]
The lesser known quote returns many more copies of the Declaration, because no one has quoted it in a page title or heading.
The inherent difficulty with quotes occurs in fact when they're quoted (and used for other purposes). This is where I wish that Google had either a quote: operator or else an advanced search option to address this.
anyone else seeing different results or can anybody explain what is different?
Me too! ;)
Levity aside, I've also found problems finding obscure quotes. Most of the quote sites are good about indexing the famous quotes, but people like Churchill were veritable fountains of quotes and anecdotes, unfortunately, quote sites seem content to focus on the famous quotes.
It's even more difficult if you don't know the exact quote and have to paraphrase for the query. What I'd like to see is a good quote/anecdote site that's striving to be comprehensive. That and a provision made for math formulae. Maths symbols are typically presented in images, which makes indexing as difficult as query entry.
...I've also found problems finding obscure quotes.
Very likely, this could be because they aren't on the web. The web is skewed considerably to the recent and the trivial. This is one of the many reasons I'd welcome the Google Library project... it would help make that huge transition from carved stones and clay tablets to papyrus, so to speak.
It's even more difficult if you don't know the exact quote and have to paraphrase for the query.
I used to have that trouble with dictionaries and the spelling of words that I could pronounce but didn't have a clue otherwise. If you can get close enough, Google will help out.
Eg, enter nemonic or pnemonic and Google will return, "Did you mean: mnemonic"
With some quotes, you can try roughly the same thing on Google. Enter, eg...
when i was a tiny little boy
...and you get
"When that I was and a little tiny boy" from Twelfth Night
You can drop "little" and still find it, but if you drop "tiny" you won't.
Even something as far afield as unhappy families are different in different ways will lead you at least to references to Tolstoy (as with the Shakespeare quote, not to the work itself). It's hard off the top of my head to come up with a good example of an obscure quote that I don't quite remember but can paraphrase, though.
...anyone else seeing different results or can anybody explain what is different?
Thinkprog - Re the difference between Windows Academic and MSN... in my first post, I suggested that Windows Academic doesn't yet have a large enough database to get even close on most searches. MSN, on the other hand, has a large database, albeit of less academic material. The algos are also liable to be different, but I haven't really explored that.
