First of all, your caveat does not hold. This article is deceptive in full. None of the advice presented here is good at all... "divide the room into quadrants and search each quadrant"? Why? Just search the entire room. The article fundamentally gives the impression that you will not actually be able to locate any spygear unless you have an RF detector and a camera beacon simply by not giving any good advice otherwise. "Check if the outlet covers have been changed?" right, because when I bug a house that I own, I also buy a new outlet cover.

No one trying to sell you something is going to tell you how you could effectively live your life without their product. This is fundamentally deceptive, and seems to have gone so far as to have fooled even you.

The article answers that:

Splitting the room into sections will help you to systematically and meticulously go through the room and clear each section without skipping over any of the fine details.

This strategy is generally known as “divide and conquer”.

In military parlance, it means that you have a much greater advantage against 2 armies of half size separately than against them both simultaneously. This is known as Lanchester's law, and the whole point is that it's non-linear.

In algorithms, the idea is roughly that, given a method which solves a problem, it is often cheaper to split your input, solve each half, then merge them, than it is to run the algorithm on the entire input. Again, non-linear.

Dividing your room into quadrants provides NO advantage to searching your room. You still have to search each unit area methodically.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The origin of the "divide and conquer" idea, the "divide and rule", is also about non-linear effects. At least two can be named here: thresholding (ensure your opponents into groups small enough you can take any individual on directly), and Metcalfe's law (effect of a group grows with the square of number of fully-involved participants).

But can it be, really? Usually one of the two goals suffers badly.

The top 50% of this article reads like low-effort content marketing cookie-cutter nonsense, and I almost stop reading there. It got somewhat interesting towards the other half, true, but someone interested in informing people instead of pushing their product (and the need for their products) could easily shorten this article by 50+%.