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.
According to a Wikipedia citation (The Guardian) this was the original mission statement.[2]
[1] https://about.google [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-pag...
Disclaimer: I work at Google.