It's not entirely clear to me either. I know that Google spiders the Zone several times daily, I think because they've recognized the content as very dynamic. But it does seem to also "forget" older threads.
Just now I googled the phrase "The republican smear campaign against Barack Obama", and got two major hits, one the Zone thread, another a letter to the editor. Clicking "repeat the search with the omitted results included" brought up the entire thread, but nothing else new. That's probably because the thread was resurrected and got spidered again recently.
I realized that I've gotten into the bad habit of going only to Google. There are other search engines. Some of them show both of the threads I started on the subject, starting with the phrase "The republican smear campaign against Barack Obama", one ending in "has begun", the other ending "continues". It seems that the threads may linger longer in some search engines than others.
BTW, perform that search on ask.com, and the results are bracketed by eight sponsored listings, including McCain's official Web site and what appear to be political consulting organizations. Is that creepy, or what? If the buys were tied to the keyword "Barack Obama", then it looks like McCain has outbid Obama for his own name.
Then, of course, there's the possibility of bookmarks. It's possible that individuals have recorded the URL, and maybe pass it around to encourage people to come and reopen the issue.
Or, maybe the RNC has tasked some interns with scouring the Net for things like that, maybe working from a database of "enemies" that collected the URL when it was fresh. Don't have any personal knowledge of that kind of thing myself. How about you check with your RNC controller?
[ ;-)...no, really ]
BTW, on a not entirely unrelated subject, there's now a way that I could publish all messages in the database to the search engines, so that they can go all the way back to the beginning. It involves putting a directory file in the site root with all the URLs I want spidered, with a limit of 50,000 per file. I could chain together about ten of those to completely expose the message base.
But should I? The issue has come up before, and not everybody's comfortable with it. Many people would prefer a private search engine. Watcha think?
(Me, I'm motivated by a single issue: I can't find the message in which you wrote "compromise is betrayal of principle", but damn, it was so harsh that the image of that post, not just the words, is burnt into my memory forever. I can see it now. Someday, I promise you, I will find that message!)