I would hope that going by popularity is something a search engine WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT DO in a corporate setting. This is a completely different scenario than what we have on the public WWW, so unless your corporation has a situation where people maliciously copy articles from others, trying to pass them off as their own content, in which case the search engine quality is the least of your problems. :)
Anyway, as I've already stated, Confluence spaces which are well looked after and are not allowed to get cluttered are a delight to search in, and as a bonus also a delight to just browse through.
P.S. Google Search results are often lousy and full of low quality results anyway, I'm not sure mentioning it makes your point as well as you think it does. As everywhere - crap goes in, crap comes out. :)
