- free of charge

    - "Google-like" searches

    - display of the number of citations

    - compatibility with certain bibliographic management software systems

    - locate a resource and directly access the library, if it has a subscription

    - interesting links to other articles dealing with the same subject

    - possibility to identify resources other than the databases proposed to the student by the university library

   - possibility to set up monitoring for a search

- real coverage is not known: no information on the sources, analysed documents and the period covered

 - opacity of the algorithm used to obtain and sort the results

 - full text search; keyword and thesaurus searches are not possible

- problems when searching by author. The system has difficulty distinguishing author names from other information in the text

- citation index is not reliable

- cannot sort by results type (for example, only articles)

- cannot sort by date (facets), except for the most recent articles