[lawlesst]

It's nice to see that Google is adding features to Scholar. There's concern in the library community that it will go away since its not a revenue producing service.

Incidentally, Microsoft Academic Search is pretty impressive so far. They've added many features. They also have an API that is pretty easy to use, which Scholar doesn't.

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/

[synparb]

I just looked at Microsoft's offering, and while it has a lot of nice features it seems like the citation counts are wildly wrong when compared to the numbers produced by Web of Science and Google Scholar. Perhaps they have not completed their indexing yet. A few other concerns that I have besides inaccuracy are (1) The interface is significantly more cluttered and confusing, and (2) In their decision to auto-generate profiles, rather than wait for authors to create their own, you have a glut of profiles that again are incorrect in the papers that are attributed to them. The chances that a significant number of people are going to go in and curate their profiles seems small, instead of having a limited but accurate collection of profiles, you end of having a majority of incorrect ones.

[mjn]

The "citation context" for a paper in Microsoft's search is particularly nice. Instead of just a list of papers that cite a given paper, you can get little blurb excerpts of the sentences that cite it.