have just been having a light hearted Google Scholar vs "real" information sources (including use of librarians) in our development team. In the red corner, our digital repository manager was linking to articles like this one about the deficiencies in Google Scholar:

CSA - Discovery Guides, Publish or Perish: Afterlife of a Published Article

It is a common experience. A University professor recalls there was an important paper that was published a few years back that applies directly to the proposal he is writing. He remembers what the paper was about but is utterly clueless as to the title, author, and publication title. It's late and the proposal deadline is only hours away but this article really must be cited in the literature survey. What to do? A quick literature search based on what the professor remembers about the article should do the job. Among the available options are the tried-and-true abstract databases that he has been using since undergraduate days or the all new, highly touted Google Scholar. Does it matter which choice he makes?

In the blue corner, I was arguing that you have to take articles like this with a grain of salt as there are lots of people who are threatened by Google's growing accesibility and the public perception of it as the ultimate information source (or more importantly, the perceptions of people who are not information professionals but might be making decisions affecting the employment of information specialists).

I came around in the end though. No matter what their motives (and I'm sure that there are many different responses amongst information professionals), calling out Google on missing information and lack of transparency is a good thing. Google Scholar needs to open up more about who it is indexing and how often.