It certainly does A history search. For “really useful”, I would suggest replacing it with the fzf integration. McFly could perhaps be even better.
True, but this works in a completely uncustomized shell which is pretty nice - I can hop on a coworkers keyboard or a machine without my .bashrc and it just works. It mostly just replaces spamming the up arrow to find commands I already ran.
yes, if you know what you are looking for. also helpful:
history
history | less
history | grep -i "SEARCHSTRING"