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

Yes. On one hand I’d like Google to improve things a bit. There are some rough edges, which is a shame because it indexes some things that are not in Scopus or Web of Knowledge, like theses and preprint repositories. On the other hand I worry that some manager somewhere would kill it if they realised that it is still around.

Every 1-2 months when Chrome updates I get banned by their throttling mechanism because I their extension makes too many requests and they see "unusual traffic"

It can take 1-2 weeks to go away and be able to use it. There's no way to get in contact with anyone. Tried the Chrome extension email, support forums.

It's a good reality check. There's no real support behind it and it can go away just like Google Reader did.

I think the motivations behind it are laudable, but they should not be the answer to the actual problem.