Microsoft Academic Search

Is this better at anything than http://scholar.google.com? I find it inferior: it's slower and I can't filter by time. Search results seem similar.

  "genetic association plate effect"
  "plate effect gwas"

The OP search doesn't turn up anything, while google scholar has highly relevant papers in the top ten. I think they still have some way to go.

I went to a talk given by one of the most senior guys at Microsoft Research, and it seems that they work on interesting problems there. One of the few gems in the dark Microsoft mine, I suppose.

Gratuitous and unnecessary use of Silverlight.

So this is something like Einztein or Academic Earth - but not for courses but for papers/publications, as far as I can get it.

Deserves a bookmark, even if it requires Silverlight for rendering certain components of the page ( "To view the trends of publication and citation, you need Microsoft Silverlight." ).

I've been meaning to read more of Alan Kay's work. This makes it easy.

  http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Detail.aspx?entitytype=2&searchtype=2&id=2276768

I like it pretty well so far, as it nicely recognizes authors and gives you all their latest work. Bookmarked for use later.. hopefully it does a nice job at getting me the articles I need by title, which sometimes google scholar doesn't do as well as I'd like.