Don't people just read the arXiv? I think Hinton is being a bit old fashioned here. A paper doesn't need to be published to a journal at all to be influential.
Personally, I only trust arxiv preprints when I know something about the authors.
t's quite easy to produce a catchy looking title and abstract. Unlike mere Googling, top conferences and journals add a layer of peer review that reduces the probability of low-quality content. I've been burned too often by random papers on the internet.