Geoffrey Pullum has suggested some further standards for the use of the term Ghits (referring to Google hits), and the other folks at Language Log seem to have jumped on board. Mark Liberman also suggests a relative measure that expresses the number of Google hits in terms of the total number of documents in the search pool, which will take some of the error away when dealing with changes over time.
Of course, there's still all that rot out there on the internet that's being measured by Google -- usage that's several years old by now and will probably never drop out of Google's search pool. This isn't a serious problem now, but twenty years from now Google won't be so great for measuring current usage if it's still jammed up with all that turn-of-the-century slang. Then again, we'll probably have an updated search tool by then, Google or otherwise, which will render all this Ghits business obsolete anyway.
Possibly, but ghit may hang around, like hoover, as a means of expressing having located and killed whatever fluff one was looking for.
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