Is it common in academia to include the number of results a Google search on a keyword yields as an evidence for the prevalence of something online?
I'm not intending to base my research paper on this evidence; it is just a supporting point in a paragraph.
For example, I'm writing a research paper on Stack Exchange; one of the paragraphs is about how popular Stack Exchange is in the internet.
In one of the paragraph, I would mention that a Google search on the keyword 'Stack Exchange' yielded about 49,600,000 results, which shows how popular it is among netizens.