Not my experience at all, in my case the suggestions have become so good that I find myself checking what articles Google has for me multiple times a day. It's easily the thing I check the most after Reddit and Hacker News. Heck, I'd love a standalone app or service just for the article suggestions alone.

Just because I search for something, say a business, on the web doesn't in any way mean that I'm interested in seeing future news stories about that business.

I spend at least an hour every morning and night waking up and falling asleep to the latest news I'm interested in, with probably 1 or 2 additional hours throughout the day -- and all from article suggestions in Google Now.

If you aren't seeing things that interest you, you can tap the dropdown menu in the top-right of each card and tap "I'm not interested in this" or "Not interested in this source" to train it towards articles that you actually do care about.

I have my calendar and email setup on my phone with contacts sync also enabled. When I get to work I have one of those pinned tabs on chrome set to inbox and all my searches on my phone and laptop are on Google. Adblocker is installed on my laptop so I never see ads there but after searching for property and a bed for the last few weeks, the ads I seem to be getting on my mobile browser point to just that. I've actually ended up buying a couple of items online because of google's suggestions (GPU, cellphone, gas heater, etc). So I think it depends on how much data you feed it and how you feed it. As for suggested places to visit, I can't comment much since I don't use that feature.

For some such inputs are rich, for others scary.

Most don't care anyways.

They're scary when they're the carrot used to persuade you to allow a full invasion of your personal life by an outside entity, which as a matter of course requires permission to store, search, aggregate, and use commercially all of the data that it finds.