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It very clearly has to be a bug. I also got ~2.5s. It makes no sense for it to take that long for everyone, even after running it multiple times in a row. The system most definitely has many types of caching, so if it takes that long, there's probably something going very wrong.

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There are comments on the thread that suggest that it is an intentional delay to prevent Google itself from being weaponized. Essentially, "powered by" is special because of automatic inclusions like "powered by wordpress" or "powered by nginx."

How can it be weaponized? Can you not search any other keyword used by those platforms? "by wordpress" is pretty fast.

I'm just pointing out the hypothesis and the train of thought. I don't know the real answer here. It's not my hypothesis.

If, for example, you wanted to harvest domain names because you had a hot 0day on wordpress, this would be a convenient way to do it.

Yes, there are probably other signatures, too.

For me:

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