As an academic that works in a research area where other indexes (like WoS, etc.) have really bad coverage, and as an academic that has a double surname and accented characters which other indexes handle terribly wrong and end up creating many duplicate profiles with a few papers each, I feel very grateful for the great tool that is Google Scholar.
Additionally, thanks to it and its recommendation system I have found many interesting papers that I wouldn't have read otherwise.
I really hope that Google keep maintaining this tool for many years.
You should get yourself an ORCID and encourage your publishers to include it in their metadata (it can be updated even after publication). You can also provide a list of publications on your profile. http://orcid.org
Yes, ORCID is also a good tool. It handles accented characters and non-US names well, and it lets you add your own publications, which makes it much better than e.g. WoS/ResearcherID. It has a much narrower scope than Google Scholar though, as to my knowledge it doesn't compute bibliographic information like h-index, etc (which sadly is a need in the metrics-oriented world of applying for positions and grants) and doesn't provide recommendation functionality or search for paper PDF's.
Of course, ORCID is trying to solve the particular problem of identifying authors and linking them to publications. Other tools generate metrics based on metadata. If more people use ORCID, then the quality of the data that those tools can use is improved.
Copyright cannot apply to facts, like the entity relation "paper X cited paper Y". So this is not a copyright issue.
However, publishers maintain databases of citations to which they sell access. Such databases are protected under sui generis database rights in many countries (e.g. EU, Russia, but not USA) - these are automatic property rights that recognise the effort of compiling a database, similar to but distinct from copyright (in that they don't have to involve any creativity).
Because there is no sui generis database right in the USA, I doubt that's the reason either - perhaps google just don't consider it a priority.
It's extremely unlikely that such database rights are an issue as ISI (Institute for Scientific Information, now part of Thomson Reuters) has been compiling this sort of data since 1960, as well as many other indexing services.
If database rights were an issue then they would have sued each other already and settled things long before Google Scholar.
More wood behind arrows or not they could at least update the black bar so Scholar could be pinned to the users App Launcher. And no reason for it to still have the old Google Logo.
It doesn't have to feel abandoned just because its niche.
Additionally, thanks to it and its recommendation system I have found many interesting papers that I wouldn't have read otherwise.
I really hope that Google keep maintaining this tool for many years.