20 years of Google Scholar

The best thing, by a long way, that Google Scholar has achieved is denying Elsevier & co a monopoly on academic search.

In most universities here in New Zealand, articles have to be published in a journal indexed by Elsevier's Scopus. Not in a Scopus-indexed journal, it does not count anymore than a reddit comment. This gives Elsevier tremendous power. But in CS/ML/AI most academics and students turn to Google Scholar first when doing searches.

or turn to sci-hub and annas-arhive :)

I'm a proud user of sci-hub but when I was still in academics, I have never used it. My school has access to all the journals I ever needed, plus more old non-digitized ones I can borrow from library (including interlibrary access).

My school has no such thing and yet requires me to find and cite research.