Google Scholar is online since wednesday and already spread like a virus. The NYT has a paper about it. It's cool because people felt that I came out of the blue (me too).

The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the company had received broad cooperation from academic, scientific and technical publishers like the Association of Computing Machinery, Nature, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Online Computer Library Center.(...) company executives say it is likely that advertisements will eventually accompany search results on Google Scholar. (...) "We don't know where the next breakthrough will come from," he said. "We want everyone to be able to stand on the shoulders of giants." (...) Google Scholar is another reflection of changing habits in the academic world, said Mr. Sack of HighWire Press. In the past decade, students and researchers have begun to go to online search engines first.

I am eager to see of librarians, archivists and documentalists will comment on this new tool. Of course there are some limits (I am quoted because I am a reviewer of a masters thesis for instance or because I am in acknowledgements of a friend's thesis) but the tool is promising with regard to the easiness of access.