I´m not sure how Barbara Partee feels about off-topic comments, and
I´m not sure how languagelog.com feels about comments in general, but
it´s a platform you can use for communication, and I´m going to use it
now.

Mark: whenever a student told me that there was absolutely no
literature on the topic he or she chose to write a paper on, I would
ask the student to sit down in front of my computer and do an online
search. I hit "CTRL + SPACE", which would lead to the homepage of the
university library. That was the first hint.

Oftentimes (I like this adverb and I will use it just like I use
"weiters" in German even though it´s not a lemma in dictionaries of
Standard German), the student will go to google.com. Obviously, he or
she will not find a solution to the problem I created. And I would say
"Is your Google better than my Google?"

I know now that his/her Google actually is different from my
Google. google.com has a search history and asks you benevolently if
you want to make advantage of it. I decided that I did - who I am
online isn´t all that different from who I really am, in "First Life",
so to speak.

But that isn´t all that insignificant: Google has data on what I use
it for. I don´t know how it decides to show some hits on the first
page and hides others.

I have decided to be very careful when it comes to GHits as
evidence. My own behavior can skew the results in a way that may be
insignificant (if I want to know how frequent a new phrase is) or
misleading (say, if I want to recommend a textbook).