Microsoft Academic Search and other free engines

The latest project of Microsoft Research seems now ready to enter the market of free publication engines… and to compete with Scholar Google, PubGet, FreeFullPDF, etc.

A quick look on it tonight gave me a good first impression:

• a nice interface: nothing original here, but vital features are present
• interesting analytic options are proposed: co-authors graph, citations analysis, etc.: see http://academic.research.microsoft.com/About/Help.htm
• Content: they claim to have 27 million publications; a quick search gave me less hits than in PubGet (“Benfluorex”: 49 in MAS, 105 in PubGet)

To investigate further and to follow…