Search Google Scholar author profiles

Search Google Scholar for author profiles by name.

Google auth-gates the direct view_op=search_authors endpoint for unauthenticated clients, so this handler falls back to a regular /scholar?q=<name> search and harvests unique /citations?user=<id> links from each result's author byline (gs_a div). The response schema is unchanged — each ScholarProfile carries author_id, name, and link. Affiliation, email domain, cited-by count, interests, and thumbnail are intentionally left None because a search page doesn't carry that metadata; callers who want them should pipe each author_id through /v1/google/scholar/author for the full profile.

after_author / before_author pagination tokens are accepted for API compatibility but ignored, since the fallback uses the main Scholar search (which paginates via page=N) rather than the gated author-search view.