Hannah's Web log

Have you ever wandered through the Google Graveyard? It's a sobering place. Row after row of digital tombstones marking products that millions of people once relied on daily. Google Reader (2005-2013), beloved by internet users everywhere as the premier RSS/Atom feed subscription service. Google Notebook (2006-2011), the early research organisation tool. At the time of publishing, 297 products rest in this graveyard, each representing someone's essential workflow that simply... stopped working one day.

I fear your beloved Google Scholar is heading straight for this graveyard, and academia is not prepared.

Google's Track Record: Killing Everything You Love

Google has proven they're not opposed to cutting products with a dedicated user base, if it fails to align strategically with their business direction. Google Reader had millions of active users when they gave it the axe. There was a change.org petition signed by 100,000 people protesting its cancellation.

Google Play Music (2011 - 2020), was a music locker and player which I personally used until its dying day. This was closely followed by the Google Podcasts app (2018 - 2024). Users of both apps were forced on to Youtube Music, an app offering a completely different user experience. (But I found open source alternatives, so don't worry about me).

Google have tried their hand at social media and messaging apps such as Google Talk (2005-2013), Google+ (2011-2019), and Google Hangouts (2013 - 2022). These failed to take off against giant Facebook, but no doubt cut off precious social connections between users using these apps.

Academia is dependent on Google Scholar for many of its activities. The main features that keep academics in a bind is not so much document search, but the author profiles and bibliometrics. We have built entire research infrastructures around this free service. Universities use Scholar's metrics for faculty evaluation, tenure decisions, and grant applications. Library instruction programs teach it. Promotion committees rely on it. International repositories integrate with it. We treat it like it's here to stay, but looking at the Google graveyard should give us pause.

Business model? What business model?

Google Scholar makes exactly zero dollars. It does not charge for services, offer premium tiers, or run ads. It also serves a small, specialised audience that doesn't drive Google's core business. In corporate terms, that makes it a "cost center".

Google generates the majority of its revenue from advertising within its main search product. But Google's own search engine is falling apart. The company that promised to "organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" now serves up what SEO experts call "the worst quality results in 14 years."

Google's AI Overviews are being flooded with spam, with scammers easily manipulating the system through tactics such as fake "best of" rankings and self-promotional content that gets cited in AI-generated summaries. Google's global search share dropped below 90% for three consecutive months in late 2024 (89.34% in October, 89.99% in November, 89.73% in December), marking the first sustained decline below this threshold since early 2015, while anecdotal trends suggest users are increasingly turning to Reddit, ChatGPT, and even TikTok as a search engine for answers.

If Google can't maintain quality in its flagship search product that generates $175 billion annually, it suggests they're either:

1. Losing their edge in search
2. Prioritising AI over traditional search quality
3. Both

In any case, it's terrible news for Scholar. The broader context of Google search decline really exposes Scholar's vulnerability. Speaking of AI…

AI Is Eating Scholar's Lunch

While Google Scholar users are still crafting Boolean queries like it's 1995, we all know students today are turning to AI for research tasks. And some of these tools offer an impressive suite of features. They search, they synthesise findings, suggest related papers, and explain complex concepts. The accuracy and quality with which they do these things is debatable. But if you're a student with a "Ps get degrees" mindset and a deadline at midnight, why wade through Scholar's clunky interface when you can just ask an AI to find you papers and get a curated summary? Google surely sees this trend and knows Scholar is becoming redundant infrastructure. Scholar was a more strategic product to keep when it was preventing competitors from dominating academic search, but those days are arguably already gone.

Google's strategic transformation into an AI-first company fundamentally conflicts with maintaining niche academic services like Scholar. The company has unified all AI efforts under the Gemini brand, with CEO Sundar Pichai stating they're "rethinking all products for an AI-driven future."

The Precedent: Microsoft Academic

Here's a deep cut for you: Microsoft Academic was an academic search engine once touted as an alternative to Google scholar. But unlike scholar, it made its dataset of authors, organisations, keywords, and journals available as open data. This made it a very useful resource that supported many research tools including VOSviewer, Unsub, Litmaps, and Semantic Scholar. Microsoft killed it anyway in 2021.

The academic community response revealed systemic unpreparedness. Despite Microsoft Academic being the second-largest academic search engine, no adequate backup systems existed. OpenAlex and The Lens emerged as replacements, but experts warned it would take years to match the quality and comprehensiveness of the discontinued service. The disruption affected commercial enterprises and academic tools globally. The lesson? Even successful, widely-used academic infrastructure gets the axe when companies decide it's not strategically important anymore.

Why keep it?

But wait - if Scholar is so doomed, why has it survived this long? Because there are some genuine reasons to keep Google Scholar, at least for now.

Despite not turning a direct profit, Scholar does present some value for Google. Academic institutions effectively compel researchers to use Google Scholar by making visibility and citation metrics essential for promotions and grant funding. Yet this participation requires researchers to create Google accounts and consent to the company's data collection and processing policies. This presents a commercial dimension to the product aligned with Google's business model of surveillance, insights, and behavioral advertising.

Google enjoys an immense amount of power in the scholarly community, and Google Scholar has a gatekeeping role, having "leveraged its system of citation counting into a tool that coordinates the scholarly economy".

Google Scholar represents a successful example of platform capitalism applied to academic infrastructure, providing value to researchers while advancing Google's strategic interests through data collection, brand enhancement, and ecosystem control. This is why it has lasted so long.

Google celebrated Scholar's 20th anniversary in 2024 with some cute blog posts and launching of minor AI features. But you know what they didn't provide? Any concrete commitment to funding, strategic priority, or long-term sustainability.

In the age of AI, this platform dominance Google has enjoyed for so long could be slipping away. Academic goodwill is not enough. This is a company that walked back their previous motto "don't be evil". Should we really be relying on them so heavily?

The Perfect Storm

So here we are: Google has a proven track record of killing academic tools, Scholar generates zero revenue in a company obsessed with billion-dollar priorities, AI is disrupting traditional research discovery, and academia has built critical infrastructure around a free commercial service with zero guarantees.

My bold prediction? Scholar gets the axe within 5 years. Google will announce it with 12 months' notice, Bluesky will have a collective meltdown, universities will scramble for alternatives, and research workflows will be in chaos for years.

Don't say I didn't warn you. When Scholar joins Google Reader in the digital graveyard, remember this moment.

Discuss on Bluesky

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

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— Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Metadata, Lattes & Impostor Syndrome) (@hannahshelley.bsky.social) August 13, 2025 at 11:28 AM