Today's scholars face an outstanding array of choices when choosing search tools: Google Scholar, discipline-specific abstracts and index databases, library discovery tools, and more recently, Microsoft's re-launch of their academic search tool, now dubbed Microsoft Academic Search. What are these tools' strengths for the emerging needs of scholars? This two-part column will explore scholars' information activities, review how well scholarly search interfaces support these needs, and highlight these tools' promising features. The first part will outline scholars' search needs and analyze Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search in this context; next issue's column will examine a library database and a discovery tool and attempt to suggest directions for future development. In keeping with this column's scope, the focus throughout will be on interface and system features rather than content. (Contains 1 table.)