Meta Moment on “Bing Scholar”

As far as I can tell, there is no Bing Scholar.  Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, does work with Wolfram Alpha to supply answers to factual & mathematical questions, and has a “Bing University” search, but they don’t have the complex agreements with multiple scholarly publishers that Google Scholar does, allowing them to index scholarly journal articles.

But a fair number of people seem to wish there was a Bing Scholar, based on the searches that lead people to my blog.  These include:

• bing google scholar
• bing scholar
• bing scholar search
• use bing to search for scholarly article
• google scholar for bing
• scholar bing
• google scholar like bing
• microsoft bing scholar
• is there a google scholar on bing

I especially like the last one, which demonstrates how thoroughly the Google brand is attached to scholarly article searches online.  It’s like saying, “Can I buy a Big Mac at Burger King?”

So far, Google is still the only major search engine with Big Macs Scholar.