Quoting as ` kvt “reverse exploit” ` gets me only a few results on Google, period. That’s true even telling it to include ones omitted as redundant. They’re all either your HN comments or blogs mirroring them. The original doesn’t appear.

That tells me that the main problem may simply be that the BugTraq post on seclists.org isn’t indexed by Google at all.

While that’d be annoying, I think it’d more likely be a specific configuration or robots.txt issue with that site than being a general issue with how searches are performed.

FWIW, the same query in Kagi found the original as the second result, just under a blog mirror of your 10/20 comment and above the comment itself. Since Kagi sources from Bing (along with Google) results, that reinforces the theory that it’s an issue specific to Google’s crawl.

Contrary to your other replies, I do think your style of query continues to work well on Google (where indexed of course)—-and so do full sentences.

I honestly think the issues when there are problems finding things usually come more down to 25-plus years of searchable internet history accreting a lot of clutter (especially in spaces like tech where old info ages out but never gets deleted), along with cynical SEO from low value sites deliberately skewing results for as long as the site remains indexed.

Neither is a Google problem, and the recency bias you observed is arguably the best way to combat both. Ads and site promotion are another story, and the reason I’m on Kagi, but I don’t think that hits tech as hard as consumer spaces.