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 :)

You use Google Scholar to find papers you're interested in, then use sci-hub to actually read them.

indeed... and use Zotero with the correct plugin to download them automagically

sci-hub hasn't been updated in 4 years and the sources for annas-archive like nexus-stc are seriously hit or miss (depends on the field).