Before a deletion nomination goes up, the guideline nominators are supposed to follow sets out four searches: a general web search, a news archive, a book search, and the Wikipedia Library's access to newspapers and journals a search engine doesn't reach. Editors know it by its shorthand, WP:BEFORE. The order matters less than the completeness — the guideline exists because "I couldn't find anything" and "I typed the name into a search box once" produce the same nomination text but describe very different amounts of work.
The shortfall rarely announces itself. "No significant coverage found" is the standard rationale, and it reads the same whether four searches happened or one. The text alone won't tell a closer, or anyone else reading the discussion, which was true.
What tells you is what the nomination doesn't mention. A subject with a documented career from the 1990s, nominated on the strength of a web search alone, will often have coverage sitting in newspaper archives that never made it online — or made it online behind a paywall a general search doesn't surface. A regional business with decades of trade-press coverage will have almost none of it indexed by a search engine tuned for the current decade. Whoever defends the article at the discussion is, in effect, marking the nominator's homework.
WP:BEFORE asks what a nominator did before writing the rationale, not what the rationale says.
Pointing out that the search was skipped is not, by itself, an argument to keep the article. A discussion that closes on "keep, the nominator didn't look hard enough," with nobody producing the sources they allegedly missed, rarely survives a closer's read — it more often draws a relist than a keep. What moves a discussion is running the search the nomination skipped and returning with what it turns up: two links to a trade journal, a paragraph from a 1997 clipping service, the page range of a book that gives the subject a full chapter.
That evidence gets read differently depending on when it shows up. A source produced mid-discussion, under deletion pressure, draws more scrutiny than the same source sitting quietly in the article from the start. Which is its own argument for running those four searches before a page goes live — not only after somebody else proposes taking it down.
