Google offers scholarly searches in Beta.
From the FAQ:
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
I think it is a case of “they did it AGAIN!”
Google has consistently been innovating itself.
They are the best example of how to be on top of the newest internet developments, just like amazon has been the best customer oriented web site ever!
Academic search
On Google’s new offering for nutty professors