Microsoft Academic Search Microsoft Academic Search Microsoft Academic Search was a research project and academic search engine retired in 2012. It relaunched in 2016 as Microsoft Academic. Microsoft launched a search tool called Windows Live Academic Search in 2006 to directly compete with Google Scholar. It was renamed Live Search Academic after its first year and then discontinued two years later. In 2009, Microsoft Research Asia Group launched a beta tool called Libra in 2009, which was for the purpose of algorithms research in object-level vertical search, data mining, entity linking, and data visualization. Libra was redirected to the MAS service by 2011
Microsoft Search Server to extract the text of the file for full text indexing as well. The handlers and iFilters MSS uses are the same as used by SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Search as well. The data sources that are to be indexed are identified by their URIs and have to be configured prior to indexing. The indexer updates the search index as soon as an item is indexed ("continuous propagation") so that the items can be queried against even before the indexing crawl is complete. MSS can also federate searches to other search services (including SharePoint and web search servers)