Stinking badges, Stack Overflow, and broken search engines

Trying to find Jeff Atwood‘s reference “Stinking badges” highlights just how broken search engines are nowadays.

I this case I knew Jeff Atwood had used “no stinking badges” (a reference to a scene the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and probably a reference us culturally challenged people are unaware of) to illustrate something about the badge system in the early days of Stack Overflow, say, the perceived value of badges. So I knew it existed and that it very probably hadn’t been deleted (or otherwise had become unavailable).

First search attempt using:

stinking badges Atwood

The search engines wouldn’t return the expected page, even though, retrospectively, all three words are on it (even at the very beginning of the page), and the combination should be fairly specific. One reason could be that search engines are now very reluctant to return web pages from before 2015 (approximately).

It was only found by qualification with “Stack Overflow blog” (effectively restricting the search to): “Stack Overflow Blog stinking badges”. Though it could also have been on Atwood’s own blog.

This is the page:

Stack Overflow Badge Feedback (2008-07-12)

The search was prompted by an answer to the Meta Stack Overflow question Temporary policy: ChatGPT is banned (that answer has now been deleted and is only visible to Stack Overflow users with more than 10,000 reputation points).

There is probably a cringe factor regarding that film. I am culturally challenged; let me know in the comments.