I'm pretty sure most people have a pretty intuitive understanding of how to perform a methodical search of a room. The article promises clever tricks for finding bugs and cameras in a room without having to spend any money, and fails to deliver on that premise, deceptively, because it is solely an advertisement for a device that is FAR more expensive than it needs to be.

>I'm pretty sure most people have a pretty intuitive understanding of how to perform a methodical search of a room

And surgeons were pretty sure they'd never leave an implement inside a patient, but the stats still improved with the introduction of checklists. Like checklists, the quadrant method means there's less demand on your memory, which means less chance of forgetting things if something unexpected happens.

Thus, the article would be much better if it provided a checklist with concrete, actionable steps instead.

This is a difference between content marketing and actually caring about informing the reader.

The checklist can also be ordered such that the lowest-hanging fruit is covered first. Start with the vent covers, overhead lights, and smoke detectors, because those are the places where it's easiest for an unskilled spy to hide monitoring devices. Any hole cut into the sheetrock for a legit purpose could also have a peephole near it.

I bought a house that had a slight dimple in the heating duct of a ground-level bathroom, mostly concealed by the vent cover. I went down into the basement, and surely enough, from a certain spot, I had a clear view of the toilet and shower from below. I bent the duct back flush with the edge of the hole, and concluded that was probably one of the reasons that the sellers were getting divorced. So you might not find a camera. There might be an actual eyeball there sometimes. An electronic scanner isn't going to find that.

This is almost obviously untrue. This is a technique used for any task that requires thorough analysis of a space, like crime scenes and archaeological digs. Sometimes to a much more fine grained resolution than just quadrants. Saying that people can "just search the entire room" is like asking why can't you "just search the entire crime scene" or "just dig out the whole fossil". It trivializes the amount of effort needed to actually perform the task to the detail required, and dismisses the insight that a little bit of work division actually can improve performance for the exact same overall task despite the overhead it adds.

> I'm pretty sure most people have a pretty intuitive understanding of how to perform a methodical search of a room.

I'm pretty sure most us techies have a pretty intuitive understanding of how to methodically build software yet we still see great benefits in breaking down projects into smaller tasks.

My point is the bigger picture often looks easy from the outset but in practice most people do benefit from dividing jobs up into smaller tasks or quadrants and focusing on each of those individually.

Not forgetting anything is covered with "paint the room" advice. Extend that to "paint the floor", and you won't forget anything.

This whole business of dividing rooms into quadrants smells awfully lot like usual content marketing non-informative filler.