Academia's reliance on Google scholar

Google Scholar bears the remnants of the old search, far away from the fast-paced enshittification. Whilst some of the so-called advancements have seeped their way through via the AI outline that is currently only available on Chrome and AI-generated 'research', Google Scholar is still a decent academic search tool. And I say that even though I have been de-googling for a while now. Degoogling has been easier since I finished my PhD. Scholar was probably the only Google product I was active on until last year. I don't use Google Scholar anymore.

As Google Scholar celebrates 20 years, Nature asked a very contentious question: Will Scholar survive the AI revolution? I don't know. I hope it does, and I hope it does in a way that it helped me before GPT. The allure of academia is about searching for truth, for knowledge even if it takes hours or months even (at least for me while trying to chase a paper written by a scholar in China, whew). No amount of chatbot can give the same braingasm as the Eureka moment after finding the literature review that you've been looking for.

Yet, in these conversations, we forget the most important question: Will Academia survive without Scholar? Without Ebsco? Scopus? Web of Science? We, academics, are at the mercy of these companies. The same way most Internet research collapsed after Meta and Twitter pulled their academic APIs. Knowledge that is meant to be for the betterment of society is locked behind paywalls that neither benefit the researcher who wrote it nor the community. We need public libraries and open access platforms, where access is not dictated by corporate whims and its addiction to profit. Public libraries must be reimagined as digital hubs. And this is more important now than ever as right-wing vitriols aim to defund libraries and revise histories. Defunding libraries and book bans are an attack on freedom of thought. We need libraries more than ever because these institutions will remember what we humans will forget.