Useful to whom is the question of course. I stopped using google a while ago because it gave me a useful response less and less frequently and I had to scroll over a lot of cruft to find a good answer if any. When google started it had the best results and no cruft.
Like people who complain that the latest macs are “terrible”, perhaps I’m simply not google’s audience any more. That doesn’t make google, or me, wrong.
By becoming so dominant they shifted from organization to inspiration, and not the good kind of inspiration, the kind where you have to spend lots of time shaping yourself to please the algorithm so that what you do and how you look is dominated by Google, whatever you're trying to do/share/sell is secondary to that.
“Worse is better” wins again.