Anyone who's ever taught college writing has encountered that most cliche means of opening an essay: the "According to Webster's, the definition of X is..." It's shoddy writing, to be sure, and I have had no qualms about banning the gimmick's use in classes I've taught.
But in reading blogs and especially in listening to presentations at work, I've found a new Digital Age version of that old standby: quoting the meaningless number of Google hits returned by a search on X. Quoting hitcount (a neologism which returns 537,000 hits!) is not quite as shoddy as citing a definition (94,500 results!), but it's close. And it may be worse for the way the hitcount gimmick tries to smuggle an utterly false sense of quantitative accuracy into the still-embryonic argument. A Google search is the opposite of accuracy: it's a way of casting a phenomenally wide net into an impossibly large ocean. What you find in the net isn't at all random, but then again it's also such an entropic mish-mash that you really ought not to make any meaningful claims about the catch - except maybe, "The ocean makes things wet."