Microsoft, Google, Vie for Your Academic Research

Heard of Google Scholar? Well, it appears Microsoft has a new product in the pipeline to fulfill a similar search niche; they're calling it Academic Search.

Why are commercial search engines creating these specialized search portals? Because they recognize that the general search engines don't always (often?) meet the needs of searchers in academe, and that many of the results in the search list are of questionable origin!

However, you can find a lot of great, academic quality info via the open WWW. Would you like to learn more about how to mine this data? Librarian Jacquie Foster will be giving an informative workshop this Friday from 11 - 12 called "Google II: Focus on Research." I highly recommend this workshop. You can find the details here.