Google Scholar released in November 2004 as a beta version is a freely-accessible search engine that indexes scholarly literature from a variety of publishing formats and disciplines.
Google Scholar helps users search for digital or physical copies of related articles either online or in a library. You can virtually search theses, books, articles, peer reviews from various societies, repositories, universities, academic publishers and scholarly organizations around the globe.
Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya were ones who initially triggered Google Scholar. Acharya announced in 2007 that Google Scholar has started digitizing journals from various publishers to separate Google Book Search from Google Scholar. Google Book Search inturn scans older journals without metadata needed for finding out specific articles.
Google Scholar’s “cited by” feature has had serious competition to ISI Web of Knowledge and Scopus. However, Google by far is relatively larger than these competitors.
Google came up with the idea of GS after Microsoft launched its Windows Live Academic Search way back in 2006.