Skeptical view of Google indexing. Rita Vine, Just Because It's Indexed Doesn't Mean You'll Find It, SiteLines, May 12, 2004. Vine, a librarian who specializes in web searching, finds problems with what many see as an advance towards accessing open content, the indexing of various databases in Google. She uses the example of PubMed and shows how a search in Google will be quite different from one in PubMed. The writer points out the detrimental effect of Google's page-ranking algorithm in this context:

In this example, I searched the keywords asthma children in Google. The result is a large results list. The sites in the first pages of results aren't particularly bad: Google weights certain domains, like cdc.gov, and medlineplus.gov more heavily and as a result the search results aren't completely overwhelmed by .com medical sites. But where are the results from PubMed? A search of the first ten pages of the asthma children search above reveals no PubMed citations. Why? Because these individual PubMed citations are hardly ever linked by other web pages, and as a result they receive a low PageRank in Google. The net effect? The low-ranked PubMed results sink to the bottom of Google's search results list for practically any medical topic.

Vine explains further limitations to Google searching compared with PubMed, especially with respect to truncation and PubMed's ability to match keywords with like MeSH headings. While a tool that searches multiple databases is highly desirable, Vine remarks, it isn't useful if it doesn't search content effectively. [Open Access News]
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