“It definitely cuts down the search time a bit,” he said. “In my experience, it came up with some very helpful resources.”

Busby said he typically uses JSTOR and Proquest for research, but said that he expects to use Scholar again in the future. He said that the technology could be improved if it allowed the user to search within specific academic fields, like political science.

Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser said he briefly used Scholar and was encouraged by what he saw.

“It’s an incredibly useful source because it takes into account a number of sources,” he said.

Repeated calls to Google were not returned yesterday. According to a press release, the search engine will remain in the “beta” testing stage until the company has determined its usefulness and whether it should remain among Google’s array of services.