It's said MS Academy Search (MSAS) launched a new version. I've used it several times. I'm glad to show my experence.
When I search a paper. I found that, MSAS is more professional than Google scholar search. Google scholar's search results are a mass of webpages which related with my keywords, while MSAS's Search results are well formed webpages. They are contributed by eager live users.
It's amazing that MSAS not only list the reference of paper , but also tell the user which papers cite the paper. That's useful to user. Because it indicates where you can get the latest work by other researchers.
When I search an author, I get more surprise. MSAS know what I want. That's Publications, Citations, Interest, Co-author, Publication and Citation. But Google Scholar makes me said. It's still a mass of webpages. The visual explorer from MSAS is very interesting. It's said, love me, love my dog. You can easily find who are the author's close co-author. It's useful to get a large view of the author you are interested in.
MSAS is not only a search but also a wiki. Everyone can upload what's he know to MSAS. Due to that, MSAS could provide more information to user, such as author's information and citations.
MSAS is also a portal of academic. You can get academic information by category, such as publication, author, conference and so on. It's helpful when you don't exactly know what you want.
On the other hand, as a portal and wiki, lots of work are done manually. I think that would be a great challenge to MSAS. I found some mistakes with the author. That wouldn't be born by strict user. By the way, the publication collected by MSAS is much less than the pages cached by Google scholar search. I think a smarter robot may bring much help.
If I'm the leader of the project. I would statistics users' preference and demand first. I think the limited publications maybe . As mentioned before, I'll focus on the smart robot. I'll enable him to collect more publication and pick up the information from the publication. And, I'll enable another robot to check the authors' information, including the information upload by users. I think another approach to get publication is cooperating with l iterature r etrieval provider.
Best wish to MSAS!
MicroTeam Hui