“And frankly, no . . . whenever someone claims they did a search and couldn’t find the article, how come it (or they) pop-up when I do?”
Same here, but there have been a handful of times where I did the search and nothing came up for me either. Like I said, it works well most of the time.
I don’t think the search works for words of fewer than four letters. Also, I’ve found articles where the poster has changed the headline to his or her liking . . . I click abuse and ask the mods to change it back. So it’s theoretically possible that an older article that does not appear for you would appear in the future after the headline is changed.