There is an interesting interview out in Nature where Richard van Noorden interviewed Anurag Acharya from Google Scholar: Google Scholar pioneer on search engine’s future : Nature News & Comment. Definitley worth a look. It has tidbits on the past, present and future of Google Scholar.
There are also some follow ups to this. For example on Twitter I saw the following exchange:
So what stops Google Scholar from having an API is that most publishers are closed access, and impose restrictions. http://t.co/ZXq08hQ1Sk
— Marc RobinsonRechavi (@marc_rr) November 10, 2014
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.@marc_rr thoughts on academic search from game-theory POV: “Changing the game of scholarly search” http://t.co/s5JP9rnCqa@phylogenomics — David McAdams (@games_to_change) November 11, 2014
I am in general agreement here that the cmmnity needs to start thinking about an open alternative. Yes, I like Google Scholar (e.g., see my post on the Google Scholar blog: Using Google Scholar in Scholarly Workflows that I wrote in honor of the 10th Anniversary og GS. But the lack of an API interface and the givng in to publishers demands seems lame. So I do think we need to start to build up new strategies. //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
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Jonathan Eisen's Lab 
Although publishers probably have to do with it, I also get the feeling from Acharya’s answer that Google Scholar isn’t particularly interested in publishing an API, and is thus not really pushing for it. However, if they were and the problem is really the publishers, than a community-developed system wouldn’t really solve the issue. Such an API would allow only open access publications and pre-prints, which would be a big step already.
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