At the outset of today's post, let me say that perpetual beta is a pointless Web 2.0 notion (a cop-out) and decidely unhelpful to academics and librarians. Beta-testing. In beta. Not quite finished yet. To be released in full soon. At times, the race that Google scholar seems to be running is against itself - both tortoise and hare. GS has few real competitors, and is cavalier about how it is developing. Why does it do this? you ask...Because it can.

I'm reminded of this as I read Barbara Quint's brief interview of Anurag Acharya in "Changes at Google scholar: A Conversation with Anurag Acharya. This is classic Acharya and Google scholar - is there any search tool and/ or chief engineer more withholding of information? He takes secrecy to whole new levels, pretending on the one hand to be upfront with librarians and information specialists about his search tool and yet stops short of details. Don't ask Acharya how big GS is, or how many searches it gets per month - he won't tell you. For some reason, he can't. Or won't.

This blog is a powerful outreach and liaison tool for those clinicians and librarians interested in search trends and open access. I also use the blog to muse on items such as globalization, trends in medicine and education and the evils of the multinationals - yes, Google too. I raise concerns, where possible, about Google, why we can't ignore it and try to be fair so that users can learn about its limitations in medicine.

However, Acharya has made our work as librarians difficult and doesn't seem to get it. As we try to teach Google, carefully measuring similarities and differences with other tools, and try to explain why - after almost three years - we still have to guess at Google scholar, its coverage of the literature, its size and how it compares to our expensive tools. Maybe librarians are tuning out, too. Meanwhile, when physicians ask, we can't explain why certain documents are not findable in Scholar but pop up in Google. Google scholar may be the fastest means to search across the Web for academic literature - but its outreach, openness and transparency is a painfully slow.

Have medical librarians been duped into promoting Google scholar, a potentially powerful search tool for users while Acharya drags his heels about revealing the details of the project? My answer is a speedy yes.