Yes, Google deserves to be distrusted and avoided as a whole, but Google Scholar is a genuinely net good for humanity.
I have similar feeing for Gmail (it's effective anti spam engine), google maps and google docs (which pioneered shared docs. It feels outdated on many fronts now, but it was a pioneer).
Google maps would only be a net good if the data was available under a free licence. As it is they take data from people that should have gone to a public project like OpenStreetMap.
"take", these people would never have produced any data if gmaps wasn't there...
At one point I contributed quite a bit to google maps, because it was the primary map system I was using at the time. Had I been using an OSM-based system, I would have made contributions there instead.