Benefits of Using Kelvin Smith Library:

Three primary reasons to use Kelvin Smith Library resources:

KSL provides freely available books, articles, and databases for CWRU students, faculty, and staff
KSL offers resources requested by CWRU faculty
KSL's search engine shows you resources reviewed by librarians and other information professionals

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Reminder: If you do use Google Scholar or Google, do not pay for a journal article from a publisher's website. Students, faculty, and staff can utilize OhioLINK and Interlibrary Loan (ILLIAD) to access materials for free that are not readily available via Full Text on KSL platforms. See the modules on these resources for more information.

Benefits of Google Scholar:

Google Scholar can be a helpful backup resource relying on Google's ability to scrape information from a wide variety of sites, including academic abstracts and some open-source websites.
You can check for papers or books that cited material you are interested, a process also known as citation chaining.
You can filter results by recent year using the menu on the left-hand side of the screen to see older or newer articles

Drawbacks of Google Scholar:

Tends to present older and possibly outdated results based on the number of citations used
Book chapter and article links will often send you to a publisher's website that asks for payment or it does not reflect KSL holdings, unlike KSL databases

Google Scholar page with the search term "robotics" shows filters, article publication dates, possible KSL access points

Benefits of Google:

Google is easy to search and provides a great deal of information
Some sites can be reliable with peer-reviewed, open-source content such as National Institute of Health publications (.nih) or offer information on current laws and cultural and historical artifacts as with the Library of Congress (.gov and .loc.gov)

Drawbacks of Google:

Google's new AI function presents information that often is not from the most reliable or informative sources, but instead seems to rely on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a service that companies often pay for
Google maintains a partnership with Wikipedia that also prioritizes crowd-sourced content with anonymous editors over reliable information provided by experts. Wikipedia pages do have works cited sections, however it will not be clear without visiting an article's Talk pages why sources have been chosen over others
Sites ending in the address .org, .com, or .net will not necessarily be created and maintained by experts on a given topic
Misinformation and disinformation are risks associated with using Google sites

In summary, using Kelvin Smith Library resources provides you with sources that are far safer and less likely to be biased that are also freely available for students, faculty, and staff.

For-profit company post about robotics optimized as top Google result

Wikipedia and for-profit company ranked as highly-optimized results on Google