• Finding journal articles by words title and abstract across a wide variety of electronic journals
• Finding materials by author across disciplines.
• Finding free preprint and open-access copies of journal articles on the web
• Natural language searching (= searching using regular spoken language rather than specialized vocabulary) for articles and resources by subject across disciplines
• Finding recently published material
• Finding papers and websites that cite a particular paper or book
• Setting up current awareness search alerts
• Citation verification, citation capture
• First-pass legal lookup.
• Academic research when academic indexes are not available, or to supplement academic indexes

Cons:

• There is little restricted subject indexing.
• Items retrieved are not necessarily peer-reviewed
• It is in no way comprehensive, and has limited field searching and proximity searching (use subject area indexes for sophisticated searching).