As I've been saying for 15 years, "Moreover, considering that Google Scholar has no real competitor, there is a strong case for establishing a freely accessible, non-specialized academic search engine that is not run for commercial reasons but for reasons of public interest."
Just came upon this again, but it's also worth mentioning Google Scholar has intrinsic crawling biases, which might further compound this issue in ways I can imagine (eg air of legitimacy by virtue of rapid citation trails), and ways I can't... www.researchgate.net/post/Google_...
Read 2 answers by scientists to the question asked by Mark Austin Hanson on Aug 27, 2022
A lot of people are listing their disciplinary preprint repositories and saying “we have this.” First of all, they’re not non-specialized. Second, they’re not search engines. Third, they don’t list books or even journal articles pre-printed. Fourth, the search tech is quite variable in quality.
We have something like this in Philosophy: philpapers.org
A citation index of Philosophy containing thousands of bibliographies.
OpenAlex! From the people who brought us Unpaywall, they took over the Microsoft Academic Graph data, incorporated other data sources like CrossRef, DataCite, and PubMed, and are busy building an API and a search UI on top of it. They have 240 million works indexed so far. openalex.org
the expenditure involved in building that from scratch would likely be stupendous. never mind the publishers that would hassle you for access fees to build the search database. If govt funded the publishers would likely bid on the contract and win, scholar is meh but at least not for profit.
A curated academic search engine that indexes only reputable journals, tracks retracted papers and provides full-text links whenever possible. One can dream...
SocArXiv for social science papers osf.io/preprints/so...
Yeah, google scholar becoming even shittier over the course of my PhD has been a source of great despair for me
Semantic scholar is a much better academic search engine. There's also Open Alex, BASE (www.base-search.net), The Lens, etc. I rarely use Google Scholar these days.
Rip Aaron Swartz /genuine