Google Scholar launched last night. Wow. I know the sales reps at LexisNexis and Westlaw are not having a good morning.

What is Google Scholar? Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research. Features of Google Scholar

  • Search diverse sources from one convenient place
  • Find papers, abstracts and citations
  • Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
  • Learn about key papers in any area of research

I’ve just started playing around, and will be sending the links over to my attorneys to get their impressions, but, well, WOW!! You can search by case, by topic, by legal issue. You can get Federal and/or state results. You can get articles and journal entries, and I am hoping blogs and other conversations will come in time. I know that Google Scholar is still in Beta, but … WOW!! Legal Research has entered a whole new millennium.