Some facts on Sci-Hub that Wikipedia gets wrong | engineuring

"First of all and important, Sci-Hub is not a search engine.

A search engine is a program that takes some keywords from user, and provides the user with documents most relevant to these keywords.

Does Sci-Hub have keywords search? No. The user needs to provide Sci-Hub with an exact reference to the paywalled paper. The reference can be an URL, or a DOI, or title of the paper, or a scientific reference.

Even if Sci-Hub had keywords search, and I want to add it in future, it would still be incorrect to call it a search engine. Because in search engine the possibility to lookup relevant documents by keywords is primary and most important function. But Sci-Hub function is very different.

The core of Sci-Hub is a script that downloads HTML and PDF pages from the Web. In that sense, Sci-Hub is technically more similar to a web scraper."