Bing & Cortana To Get Academic Search Integration At A Whole New Level

Microsoft shared details about their future plans for deeply integrating academic data/search into the Bing search engine.

Starting this Fall, Microsoft said they “will be able to point the way to a wealth of information from the academic community.” Microsoft explained that currently Cortana, Microsoft’s version of Google Now and Apple Siri, is powered by Bing. But in the Fall Bing “will have academic data tightly integrated and prominently featured on its search pages.”

Adding a blow to Google, Microsoft added that “instead of treating scholarly information as a separate search engine – as competitors,” clearly implying Google here. Microsoft Bing will make the academic data as “a first-class citizen in Bing search results.”

Harry Shum, Microsoft executive vice president of Technology and Research, announced this yesterday at the Faculty Summit event in his keynote.

Harry discussed how the Cortana Notebook, which empowers users to specify how much information they want Cortana to track for them, will gain an “academic” theme. When activated, it will use Bing to discover and alert users about academic events such as conference agendas and paper due dates, tailored to a user’s interests.”

“By growing Microsoft Academic Search from a research effort to production,” Wang says, “our goal is to make Bing-powered Cortana the best personal research assistant for our users while augmenting the previous site as Microsoft Research’s social and outreach portal for the research community.”