20 years of Google Scholar

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 It feels outdated on many fronts now, but it was a pioneer).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.