Let’s take a look at what Google returns for searches of some common real-world phrases taking the form “blank or die”.

Now let’s examine the relative results if we include just one popular website named similarly. “Popular” may be going a bit far. I’d venture a bet that less than 20% of the people reading this have ever heard of Funny or Die.

This highlights a fundamental truth, which is that the internet loves to talk about itself. The web is a self-perpetuating PR machine, egged on by the algorithms that Google and others use to assign relevance rankings to search results.

The lesson is that just because the internet doesn’t think something is important doesn’t mean you should believe it. Amazing, beautiful, fascinating content exists our there, and it shouldn’t take 24-million search hits to justify that.