I just tried that -- with TStanley's "Writing a module test" which is a couple days old now and with some much more elderly root nodes of my own.

No joy.

So I went to advanced search, asked for the same items with a "from perlmonks.com only" qualifier and exact phrases using root node titles again.

Again, no joy!

My little experiment may have been inadequate in many ways, especially the limited sample.

But it may be that Google's indexing of pm is painfully inadequate. Running the same experiment against some of the sites I maintain turned up no such shortcomings, even when targeting a word used exactly once in a site that's been on line for barely a week.

And while crawling the links has costs -- for pm and for the user who has to wade thru '"Re^3: blah," "Re^2: blah",' the best material, IMO, tends to be in the replies, rather than the OPs. And wading thru the OPs and their answers, seeking the relevant ones can also be painful for the seeker.

Just my .02 (two cents, tuppence... does anyone have any non-English equivalent idioms?).