Failure in using computer search mechanisms

Had a test of using the computer search systems, both on my own computer's extensive files I have saved over the decades, and using the google online search engine, and found something was not working adequately.

The task was to find an exact reference article, URL, of a news article I had read years ago and surely had saved its text at the time. But the "search terms" usage was not adequate to the task. I remembered two parts of the article.

The first part of the article described a crime case where the assaulted person absolutely identified an accused person as the assaulter on sight. The case was made against the accused; but in court, an alibi was put forth that was uncontestible as to where the accused was at the time of the assault. Yet the witness was adamant about the identity of the assaulter as being the accused. Eventually the interesting thing was found out that the accused was an actor who was on the television show being watched by the assaulted victim at the time of the assault; and had somehow mixed up the identities in memory.

(Note: I wonder if that is related to the story "Elephant Man" too; I had heard someone mention that story long ago.)

The second part of the article, which was the main point of the article, was in an experiment where people were shown a specific person and told to report if the person ever did some specific bad thing. Then an extended time later, maybe a year later, the same people were asked if that person had done the specific bad thing, and many of the people thought the person had actually done the specific bad thing, even though they had never seen the specific person in the meantime. (It worked on adults, too.)

I tried several groups of words and phrases input to the search fields both in google search and on my personal computer. My computer had a couple thousand entries come up and I looked through all their titles. Similarly, Google came up with over a hundred thousand possibilities; I looked at the leading several dozen of each group of search terms I tried; then gave up on the task.

So the question is, how does one use the great search capabilities of the computer systems to find a specific item that is remembered in the many-worded vague way described above? Groups of possible key words did not seem to work; although what exact words were used in the subject article was unknown, except for a few obvious ones, which were inadequate to do the search task by the computer search mechanisms.

Supposedly the psychological principle described in the article is well-known in law enforcement and investigative circles, per the article. Yet, I could not find the article using the search mechanisms.