Google results as proof… of nothing

I just saw John Gruber’s post calling CNN his ‘Jackass of the Week’ for running a story about the moon landing being a hoax. I couldn’t agree with him more. Reading the CNN article lead me to this passage.

Twenty-five percent of respondents to a survey in the British magazine Engineering & Technology said they do not believe humans landed on the moon. A handful of Web sites and blogs circulate suspicions about NASA’s “hoax.”

And a Google search this week for “Apollo moon landing hoax” yielded more than 1.5 billion results.

I have seen high numbers of Google results used before as evidence of something’s popularity, when in fact they are evidence of nothing. Google’s spiders crawl the deepest corners of the ever-expanding Internet, thus Google returns billions of results for almost any combination of search terms. It is awful that CNN would use the number of results returned in Google as proof of anything.

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