Good point and I do use it, but it's not a good match for these purposes and especially for the general public:
It's limited to scholarly papers and those have limited domains (in topics and in currency of information - limited current events, for example). Also, GS omits much that is high quality, even the news sections of Nature and Science (and other journals, I expect), the NY Times news, the BBC news (not the opinion sections), Consumer Reports, online exhibitions from credible institutions (e.g., Smithsonian), research from credible think tanks, etc. Finally, availability, accessibility and quality are poor: GS requires much more effort than standard search engines to obtain applicable search results and then to obtain the papers, many scholarly papers can be difficult to read for general audiences, and without expertise it is difficult for people to distinguish fringe papers from one person from consensus from laws of nature.
In my vision, scholarly papers would be listed in a separate box in the UI, for people who want to read them and to remind everyone else that they are available. I'm afraid if the general public got search results that had some papers at the top, it would turn them off.
It's limited to scholarly papers and those have limited domains (in topics and in currency of information - limited current events, for example). Also, GS omits much that is high quality, even the news sections of Nature and Science (and other journals, I expect), the NY Times news, the BBC news (not the opinion sections), Consumer Reports, online exhibitions from credible institutions (e.g., Smithsonian), research from credible think tanks, etc. Finally, availability, accessibility and quality are poor: GS requires much more effort than standard search engines to obtain applicable search results and then to obtain the papers, many scholarly papers can be difficult to read for general audiences, and without expertise it is difficult for people to distinguish fringe papers from one person from consensus from laws of nature.
In my vision, scholarly papers would be listed in a separate box in the UI, for people who want to read them and to remind everyone else that they are available. I'm afraid if the general public got search results that had some papers at the top, it would turn them off.