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
Web search engine formed the basis for W3Catalog, the web's first primitive search engine, released on September 2, 1993. In June 1993, Matthew Gray, then at MIT, produced what was probably the first web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and used it to generate an index called 'Wandex'. The purpose of the Wanderer was to measure the size of the World Wide Web, which it did until late 1995. The web's second search engine Aliweb appeared in November 1993. Aliweb did not use a web robot, but instead depended on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site