In my opinion, back then, they needed the data as a training set for spammy domain detection. Now that SERP spam is no longer a serious issue (in Google's eyes anyway), why bother. Google always knows what's best for you.
Given the number of clones of StackOverflow and GitHub that show up on the front page, even at the cost of replacing the original SO and GH links that they copied from, I can only assume either Google's eyes are blind or the search engine devs are so good at their job that they never need to Google anything themselves.
Whole first page is just poorly written fiverr style articles, all by people for whom English is clearly a second language, at best.
Eventually, legit stuff gets on the first page too, but theres a few instances where weeks later the first result is still one of these garbage seo-torture sites.
Has really made me lose my faith in google lately.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733227
TL;DR: No.