Google is one of the largest and most popular Web search engines. It is a tool for finding resources on the World Wide Web. Google can scan web pages to find instances of the keywords that the searcher has entered in the search box. The mission of Google is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It is the largest search engine on the Web that receives over 200 million queries each day through its various services. Google is inspired from the term “Google”, which is a common spelling of ‘Googol’ meaning 10100 (Brin and Page; 2006).
The Internet users today prefer Google as the one-stop searching point. They are imagining their library catalogue and their favourite journals searchable through Google’s search box, which havebeen declared the winner for its simplicity. Surveys after surveys are telling that users are going away from libraries to Google (Sathyanarayana; 2004; p.1). Google has already been established as world’s # 1 search engine. Since its inception, Google is in a process of continuous development of varieties of tools and services for easy retrieval of World’s information. A few such tools and services include Google Directory, Google Image Search, Google News, Google email (Gmail), Google Catalogue Search, etc.
The extent to which the use of the Google search engine has permeated academic culture is illustrated by a single statistics from a recent survey of academic authors, which found 72% of the authors are using the Google search engine to search for scholarly articles (Swan and Brown; 2005). An important limitation on the use of the general search engine Google is the growth of content on the World Wide Web (Friend; 2006). This has created real problems for users seeking the information most relevant to their needs. A reader with very little knowledge of a subject is easily led down paths into an information dilemma when so many Web sites are available. Hence, the development of specialist search services, such as Google Scholar, is an inevitable and a welcome development.
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Google Scholar: A Tool To Search Scholarly Information On The Web
