Agreed. It may be useful but I don't see how it fits Google's overall mission; Google Answers were more relevant and they killed it (a long time ago).

Maybe the strategy is to eventually make sessions public? which would actually add value for the community.

Or it's a cheap ploy to get people to use Google+ (and if so, good luck with that).

This is the core concept of organizing the world's information. If you think otherwise, you don't realize that the majority of the world's information is held by individuals for brief periods of time and specific to its application. The generalized consensus has already been archived, but insights into emergent things that come up in life have not. Connecting people with each other to give advice about situations that can't be predicted but can be categorized is the next step.

"Google Answers were more relevant and they killed it (a long time ago)."

Oh I had quite forgotten about that! Good point.

See how things used to look :)

http://answers.google.com/answers/

At least with Google Answers the information was public.

> Or it's a cheap ploy to get people to use Google+

Everything Google's done lately has been about Google+

it is helping to make information universally accessible, which is part of the company's mission. lots of information cannot get organized yet because it's still contained inside people's minds. if you see each individual as an information source -- much like a website -- then helpouts is organizing the information by lumping the sources into well-defined categories and showing when that "information" is available as well as its quality.