I am surprised by the negative comments. I admit that I only post to G+ once or twice a week, but I have some very interesting people in my circles and use G+ about as often as Twitter to find cool/useful stuff to read and experiment with.

All that said, nothing replaces owning your own domain for your content and having your blog as a sub-domain. Own and control your stuff.

Mostly my current use of web search is just searching for runtime error messages or APIs. For leads on new trends, etc. I trust the people I associate with on Twitter and G+ to point me to great tech material.