Black is white. Pants are shirts. Minitrue called, "Santorum" is a substance and not a person.
The fact that this particular association is notorious almost entirely on the Internet, and that any notoriety it has achieved outside the Internet falls directly from its success on the Internet... well, that's not relevant. We have always used the word santorum as a common noun.
I think a lot of the distaste people have for santorum is that there was an active campaign to coin and propagate it. But lots of words have that heritage: if someone looks up "pegging" on Google, no one gets upset when it turns out to be an invented but widely adopted sex term.
Savage's hostile intent, though, has a major role in people thinking santorum's an illegitimate word, even though no one can point to any real metric by which Santorum should trump santorum; we all like to feign genteel shock at crassness. But we can't let our emotions, be they anti-Santorum or anti-Savage, dictate whether Google should manually intervene to change the ordering of the search. That road leads to 1984.
The fact that this particular association is notorious almost entirely on the Internet, and that any notoriety it has achieved outside the Internet falls directly from its success on the Internet... well, that's not relevant. We have always used the word santorum as a common noun.