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 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.