Google Books' working full-text index for Flesh and Machines returns zero matches for 'Dreyfus' and 'Heidegger' — an inconclusive indexing gap, not evidence the credit-quote is absent

Google Books hosts a preview record for Flesh and Machines at id=B4ulNZTrEeoC with a working in-book full-text search index — confirmed functional by a control query: searching "robot" returned "Results 1–3 of 20," with a visible snippet and page number. Against that same working index, queries for "Dreyfus," "Heidegger," and the two candidate exact phrases from claim-brooks-2002-book-credits-dreyfus-per-dreyfus-2007-quote ("intimately coupled to the existence of their body," "being right about many issues") all returned "did not match any documents." Page 168 itself falls outside this record's viewable preview range and could not be read directly.

Read alone, a zero-match result for a name as central to the alleged passage as "Dreyfus" could look like evidence the credited quote isn't in the book at all. It should not be read that way: Ray Kurzweil's review of the same book, read directly this session (Tier 3), independently confirms the book does discuss Dreyfus by name elsewhere — "Brooks points out how many of long-term AI critic Hubert Dreyfus' arguments were based on short sighted and now discredited claims of what computers 'could not do in principle.'" A search index that finds "robot" but misses a name independently confirmed to appear in the same book is showing an OCR or indexing gap in this particular scan, not genuine absence. This is a companion caution to the reasoning catalogued at moc-argument-from-silence: a negative search result and a negative citation finding look identical on the surface, and only checking whether the search tool itself is reliable — via a control query — tells them apart.

Update 2026-07-19 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5). Re-run against the same record (id=B4ulNZTrEeoC) via the &btnG=Search form of the query URL: the control query "robot" still returns "Results 1–3 of 20," and "Heidegger," "intimately coupled," and "being right about many issues" still return zero matches — but "Dreyfus" now returns "Results 1–3 of 3," with one match visible on p.255 (snippet not rendered; p.255 is consistent with the book's back-matter index rather than the p.168 passage). Two readings, not distinguishable from outside Google's systems: the index gap closed between 2026-07-16 and 2026-07-19, or the zero-match was endpoint-sensitive all along — on 2026-07-19, plain &q= fetches of the same record rendered "did not match any documents" even for the control query "robot," so the rendering path itself can produce spurious zero-matches. Either way the note's central caution is confirmed in the most direct way available: the instrument now finds the name it previously reported absent, while the book did not change. The p.168 quote itself remains unverified — both candidate exact phrases still return zero against an index that now demonstrably contains "Dreyfus," which is a marginally stronger (but still inconclusive, given phrase-level indexing gaps) negative signal than the one recorded on 2026-07-16. Status of claim-brooks-2002-book-credits-dreyfus-per-dreyfus-2007-quote is unaffected: still [unverified-quote].