Electronic resource librarians know that it is dangerous to rely on one vendor for a product without competition. In Googlization, Vaidhyanathan explores deeply how dangerous it is to rely on one company, Google, to be a global society's primary search engine, video provider, e-mail service, translator, cloud storage, and academic research service. Google puts forward Google Scholar for scholarly research, but Vaidhyanthan points out that it is "broad but shallow," "collections are uneven and results undependable," and "the search interface lacks the detail librarians and scholars demand to find the precise article they need" (p. 194). Library patrons, and especially undergraduate researchers, seldom understand the weaknesses of this primary competitor with the scholarly databases provided by libraries.
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