Curiously, I've just realized that I have an example that contradicts my own point.

My work involves a lot of machine-recognized text (if that's a term), in a specialist field, which means a lot of garbage. Sometimes I just copy and paste a "word" (for lack of a better term) into Google and it manages to figure out what I want to ask, by, presumably, stripping out special characters, among whatever other magic it does. And I also rely on databases where the contributors don't bother with consistent indexes. For example, in one place it might say "AB-123", in another "AB123", or even "AB12-3". And all that Google manages to handle.

This is useful. I guess I wish that in my free time I could interact with a version of Google for not stupid people.