For me, I use it maybe ones or twice a month when my traditional search on DuckDuckGo fails. And, anecdotally, it is overwhelmingly wrong, and worse, confidently so.

Given my sample is biased as I am using it for an outlier of difficult web searches (including web searches localized to Iceland). But I would think that if your parent was correct, at least majority of my uses would be correct, but in my experience, Gemini fails most of the the time traditional web search fails. So to me at least, it is effectively useless.

For people who use it in place of normal web search, it is probably worse then useless, because of how confidently wrong it is.