Popularity

This time it is for a product, but usually google folks congratulate themselves on a good search too. It would be something along the lines of some stranger approaching an employee or an email from some exotic location specifying how a google search saved someone's life. I find it very amusing. Unless other search engines didn't turn it up, isn't the congrats due to the general power of internet?

Either way, people seem to be associating google with the information it catalogues for us. And also because google is returning it, there seems to be a general consensus for trusting the information. Kishore's lawsuit and Zawodny's blog. If you go by the basis of page ranking, this would mean that popularity equates by a stretch to legitimacy or maybe even authenticity.

But then again wasnt that the case even before the internet?