It was similar to Google Scholar, but rather than crawling the Internet for academic content, search results came directly from trusted sources, such as publishers of academic journals.

[citation needed] Users were required to log in to access the service.

Live Search Academic was known as Windows Live Academic Search when the beta version was officially launched on April 11, 2006.

[1] The name had changed to Live Search Academic by December 6, 2006, when Microsoft announced the addition of millions of new articles, mainly in biomedicine.

The project scanned 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles.