Many times on the internet I’ve seen people claim that something is more or less popular/known than it really is based on a poorly formulated Google search.
Web search engines aren’t really designed to deliver comparisons of popularity, anyhow; those numbers are pretty much a way of saying “look, we index a lot of stuff!” rather than an accurate count.
Systems like Google Books’ Ngram Viewerare designed to compare popularity of terms — though that one indexes over a corpus of works in print, which is not the same as the Web.
This is better, but it’s also common to get Ngram viewer wrong—eg not realizing that a word has multiple meanings which may have changed over time, or not realizing that there are two different ways to phrase the same thing, etc.
Web search engines aren’t really designed to deliver comparisons of popularity, anyhow; those numbers are pretty much a way of saying “look, we index a lot of stuff!” rather than an accurate count.
Systems like Google Books’ Ngram Viewer are designed to compare popularity of terms — though that one indexes over a corpus of works in print, which is not the same as the Web.
This is better, but it’s also common to get Ngram viewer wrong—eg not realizing that a word has multiple meanings which may have changed over time, or not realizing that there are two different ways to phrase the same thing, etc.