Microsoft Academic Search has been made a public beta. Before you get too excited this is not Academic Live resurrected. This is a project from Microsoft Research Asia and although the help screen says “Find top scientists, conferences, and journals in a specific field” it only seems to cover computing and the Internet.
The visual explorer is interesting – you need to install sliverlight – and the Advanced Search is reasonable, but if like me you were expecting a worthy competitor to Google Scholar you will be disappointed. But if you are interested in conferences and papers on computing and Internet technologies then give it a go.
it seems it has interesting “publish citation trend” feature in their recent update. go to an authors pages to see it.
also, it appears to update new papers every week.