Washington's University critics about google scholar are worth to have a glance.

The pluses are obvious: - it's free and easy to use. - it does a pretty good job of delivering only "scholarly" stuff. - the "cited by" links are especially handy and far easier (if far less complete) than searching in Web of Science. - there are many links to free fulltext and available fulltext (for WU users). - sometimes it's actually searching and retrieving from fulltext; most search tools only search titles, citations, abstracts and keywords.

The minuses are subtle, but a bit worrisome: - holes in coverage aren't obvious; if you just want a few recent citations this is OK; if you want a more comprehensive search, other tools need to be used; undergraduates and casual searchers may not appreciate these distinctions. - citations may not link to fulltext even when we do have access at another site or print copies in the library or access via Interlibrary Loan request; again casual searchers may not consider other options and may supply their credit card to get access when it would be freely available via another route. - lots of search, sort and download features are missing, citation formats are inconsistent, etc., but this is a Beta site right now so I expect some improvements may be forthcoming.