[9][10] Their goal was to "make the world's problem solvers 10% more efficient"[11] by allowing easier and more accurate access to scientific knowledge.

[13] In 2011, Google removed Scholar from the toolbars on its search pages,[14] making it both less easily accessible and less discoverable for users not already aware of its existence.

Around this period, sites with similar features such as CiteSeer, Scirus, and Microsoft Windows Live Academic search were developed.

[23] It indexes "full-text journal articles, technical reports, preprints, theses, books, and other documents, including selected Web pages that are deemed to be 'scholarly.

Since December 2006, it has provided links to both published versions and major open access repositories, including all those posted on individual faculty web pages and other unstructured sources identified by similarity.

Google Scholar also provides links so that citations can be either copied in various formats or imported into user-chosen reference managers such as Zotero.

[16] Individuals, logging on through a Google account with a bona fide address usually linked to an academic institution, can now create their own page giving their fields of interest and citations.

According to Google, "three-quarters of Scholar search results pages ... show links to the authors' public profiles" as of August 2014.

[25] Research has shown that Google Scholar puts high weight especially on citation counts,[30] as well as words included in a document's title.

[32] Some searchers found Google Scholar to be of comparable quality and utility to subscription-based databases when looking at citations of articles in some specific journals.

Large-scale longitudinal studies have found between 40 and 60 percent of scientific articles are available in full text via Google Scholar links.

[46] These researchers concluded that citation counts from Google Scholar should be used with care, especially when used to calculate performance metrics such as the h-index or impact factor, which is in itself a poor predictor of article quality.

[48] The practicality of manipulating h-index calculators by spoofing Google Scholar was demonstrated in 2010 by Cyril Labbe from Joseph Fourier University, who managed to rank "Ike Antkare" ahead of Albert Einstein by means of a large set of SCIgen-produced documents citing each other (effectively an academic link farm).

[50] Unlike other indexes of academic work such as Scopus and Web of Science, Google Scholar does not maintain an Application Programming Interface that may be used to automate data retrieval.

[53] ASEO has been adopted by several organizations, among them Elsevier,[54] OpenScience,[55] Mendeley,[56] and SAGE Publishing,[57] to optimize their articles' rankings in Google Scholar.