Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides you a familiar search interface to locate scholarly literature. Like Google you will always get results -- although they may not be the most recent or the best articles for your topic. Google does not share its algorithm for matching articles to your search.
The results include peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Full text is available for many items (sometimes because the article is being posted without clearing copyright).
Unlike databases, results cannot be filtered by subject area or other limiters.
Nevertheless, it is another resource that can be used in your research. You can also review the references of articles you find in Google Scholar to locate other useful sources.
Passkey
If you are doing research off campus, you can access the full-text of many books and articles by going through the Cornell library catalog or through databases. If you choose to do research using Google Scholar, you will not automatically be taken to the full text of articles. Sometimes, you go to the publisher's page and are informed that you can access the article if you pay a fee.
To avoid having to pay a fee, it is recommended that you install Passkey into your browser. Then when you hit a roadblock to access (the library world calls this a paywall), you can just click on the Passkey icon and it changes the URL of the article and allows you to access the content for free. Of course, this only works if Cornell subscribes to the journal!
Consult the library guide on Passkey for more information about installation.