Microsoft Academic Search flagship search engine, Bing, and its intelligent personal assistant service, Cortana. “By growing Microsoft Academic Search from a research effort to production,” [Microsoft Research's Kuansan] Wang says, “our goal is to make Bing-powered Cortana the best personal research assistant for our users" 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.
Distributed search engine Distributed search engine A distributed search engine is a search engine where there is no central server. Unlike traditional centralized search engines, work such as crawling, data mining, indexing, and query processing is distributed among several peers in a decentralized manner where there is no single point of control. In April 2000 several programmers (including Gene Kan, Steve Waterhouse) built a prototype P2P web search engine based on Gnutella called InfraSearch. The technology was later acquired by Sun Microsystems and incorporated into the JXTA project. It was meant to run inside the participating websites' databases creating a P2P network that