While I don't specially disagree with you, the difficulty of a problem and its benefit to humanity are two completely orthogonal issues.

The fact that it's ultimately aimed at selling ads doesn't make what Google does (for example) in NLP an easy task.

How many google programmers are actually doing that though?

Compared to something inane and dull like the number trying to get the logins for all the different services actually working with each other properly?