20 years of Google Scholar

Fun fact about Google Scholar: it’s "free", but it’s just another soulless Google product - no clear strategy, no support, and a fragile proprietary dependency in what should be an open ecosystem. This creates inherent risks for the academic community. We need the equivalent of arXiv for Google Scholar

I miss the Google of yesteryear which had an altruistic streak and felt that enriching the world's ability to share and process information would ultimately accrue benefit to Google as well.

The Google of today is far more boring and less helpful.

Its a hard job to maintain systems in an altruistic state, cause opportunists and parasites are drawn in larger and larger numbers to where ever resources accumulate.

Google has a decent job not turning fully into an Oracle for example.