P.S.--Note that much of the misunderstanding is attributable to misnaming. I know that Ms. O'Leary appreciates the powerful impact of language upon thought. If you refer to the process of sample selection as "search," designate a particular subset of the sample space as the "target," and say that the selection process "hits the target" when the sample includes an element of the subset, then you will have a very hard time thinking straight about sampling.

Ms. O'Leary, my 1996 formulation of "search" was needlessly complicated. With simplification, "search" is clearly a process of sampling a set of alternatives (which Dembski and Marks refer to as the sample space). To my huge embarrassment, "conservation of information" turns out to be nothing but obfuscation of statistical independence -- a concept that undergraduates encounter early in introductory courses on probability and statistics. There can be no conservation of information in random selection of a sample because there is no information whatsoever. It is absurd to speak of conserving what does not exist.

If samplers have no information about the samples they draw, then how do we account for the fact that sampler ("search") A is more likely than sampler B to select a sample that includes at least one element of the target (to "hit the target")? There is not the least mystery here. Samplers differ in their biases. That is the gist of why I was wrong to indicate in 1996 that information somehow resides in samplers, and why Dembski and Marks are wrong to do so today.

The following includes a technical correction of my own errors, but ends with exposition that should make sense to everyone who is able to follow you:
http://boundedtheoretics.blogspot.com/2014/08/sam...

The errors of Dembski and Marks apparently derive from a misunderstanding of the "no free lunch" theorem for search. The following links to an interview in which Marks attempts to explain the theorem in layperson's terms, and provides an accessible discussion of how he goes awry:
http://boundedtheoretics.blogspot.com/2012/04/bob...