Microsoft has introduced a new search tool to help people find scholarly articles online. The service, which includes journal articles from prominent academic societies and publishers, puts Microsoft in direct competition with Google Scholar. The new free search tool, which should work on most Web browsers, is called Windows Live Academic Search (http://academic.live.com). It currently includes eight million articles from computer science, electrical engineering, and physics, disciplines selected as having highly structured metadata already in place, with planned expansion to cover all areas in which there are scientific journals. Microsoft and other technology companies have seen academic searches as an increasingly valuable sector. Some have estimated that the academic-search business could be worth $10-billion by 2010; academic users are judged to perform six times as many searches as other people. Among the tool's strengths, noted one librarian who previewed the product prior to public roll-out, are an interface that can be personalized, and a split screen that can feature lots of information at one time. Among the disappointments noted is that the search engine has no feature that can track citations like Google Scholar. A search using Windows Live Academic Search will bring up citations of articles. A researcher who clicks on an article's link might get direct access to the full text, if the researcher's computer is covered under a site license that includes the journal in which the article was published. Other users of the search engine may have to buy access to articles through the publisher. A number of organizations have signed up to work with Microsoft on the new search tool, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the Institute of Physics. Major publishers Taylor & Francis Group, Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, the Nature Publishing Group, and John Wiley & Sons, have signed on as well as library organizations that include the British Library and OCLC Online Computer Library Center.