I have my students do research papers and do not allow them to use Google searches. Our school has an account with an online database search that accesses scholarly articles. That’s where they must obtain their info. Google is crap when it comes to doing research.
It is very unfortunate the professional society sites, scholarly sites, and good aggregation sites are all so expensive. It is very frustrating to find interesting abstracts online, but rarely have access to the paper.
I have found that even for normal searches, Google is becoming useless. Too much cruft in the way and too many non-responsive hits popping in. The first page is usually paid positions, so it is hard to know whether it is properly responsive or not. It has also been affected by political considerations. . . and Google disappears things that some employees don't like.
I discovered this back in 2008 when I did a search for Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate . . . and found that Google had replaced every single instance of the images with innocuous campaign stop images. If you went to the links, the BC pictures were still on the sites, but the Google thumbnails had been replaced with non-representative photos that DID NOT SHOW THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE! I posted this fact here on FreeRepublic, and posted screen shots of the searches and results, and others confirmed the situation, and it continued for about a week, when suddenly the correct thumbnails of the birth certificate re-appeared without explanation.
I now use DuckDuckGo for searches.