Read my letter to Sundar Pichai, go to Google Scholar, and raise your voice against Google’s unscrupulous and unscholarly ride for commerce and greed.
Dear Sundar,
I have been getting emails from Google reminding me “Time to update your articles”. Least said, such emails with no provision for replying are scandalous (scholarcitations-noreply@google.com) and against professional civility and etiquette. That you are CEO of a one-sided organization such as Google which seems to think it is the monarch of all that it surveys is a tragedy. I don’t know what is your understanding of a scholar. In any case, the Google Scholar section is haphazard, unreliable for veracity, unauthorized, arbitrary, and an affront to concerned scholars like me.
The information given in it is liable to be misused. In fact, it is already extensively misused, and undermines the very idea of knowledge production and dissemination. Worse still, Google Scholar run by Google itself excludes genuine scholars who may be freelancers and retirees like me without formal affiliation to academic institutions from which they retired, and depend on websites like Google.
Will you give me a convincing answer or persist with the digital malaise and menace propelled by profit? I agree to the fact that academics across the world have succumbed to a digital company like yours to flaunt their own academic credentials, but that does not discount the fact that you have become a shame to your own country, leave alone academia. Google Scholar has a creepy, corrosive, and corruptive effect particularly on the youth into whose life and future it is injecting deadly poison for commerce and greed.
Best,
Professor P Radhakrishnan