Those who have become researchers in the last 10 years have no idea how difficult it was to access scholarly articles. And they have one man to thank for making their life very very easy. He is Anurag Acharya, the man behind Google Scholar. Acharya says the idea for Google Scholar came to him when he was a student at IIT-Kharagpur and was struggling with accessing scholarly materials. He took that idea with him to the US, where he went for his doctorate at the Carnegie Mellon University. After a stint as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, he became an assistant professor of computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. While working there he heard of a new startup called Google and joined the company.
There he worked on web crawlers and helped the search engine index the world’s websites. After a few years at the company, he started working on his idea from his IIT days and along with Alex Verstak, created one of the most revolutionary web products ever created in Google Scholar. To this day, Acharya works on the Google Scholar project at the company constantly tweaking it and making it better and is unusual in the company for being on the same project for so long.