I'm a Google employee, but don't work on maps. I also don't speak for the company... and so on and so forth.
If you zoom in on Google Maps, you can see that the city is marked as Gereida, so it's not the lost city he's claiming it is. Now, I'm happy to listen to people who think it should surface at higher zoom levels, since there's nothing around it, though I suppose that's a feature request for the maps people.
It's marked as a PoI of type "City Center", potentially from a user adding it. It is not in your data set as a city and does not render as such, which is why it disappears at higher zoom levels. This also explains why people down-thread cannot forward resolve the city's name but searching for it works once a small-enough bounding box is established.
So no, Google does not render this city and it's probably inaccessible via your geocoding tools. It's the equivalent of a restaurant from Google Maps's perspective. It goes without saying I feel weird explaining this to you. :)
There is a road going through it, but the city is unmarked. The conclusion in the forum is that this city is Gereida, but a search for it doesn't return anything in GM.
One interesting thing is that the search for "Gereida" does work, but only if I'm already over Sudan. I guess it needs more context to do the search, but "Gereida, Sudan" isn't sufficient.
edit: it does work anywhwere if you search for "Gereida near Buram, Sudan", but I don't think anyone would ever search for that.
It is named on the map view (non-satellite) for the 3 highest zoom levels. I also doubted dmayle's allegation, but did find the label after a minute of searching. I agree with the suggestion that the label should show up on lower zoom levels.
Was this true as of when they had the discussion? Note that the discussion took place in December, and they subsequently added the city to OpenStreetMaps and to Wikipedia. Someone may have added the point of interest to Google Maps since then, or Google Maps may have automatically pulled that information from OSM or Wikipedia.
If you zoom in on Google Maps, you can see that the city is marked as Gereida, so it's not the lost city he's claiming it is. Now, I'm happy to listen to people who think it should surface at higher zoom levels, since there's nothing around it, though I suppose that's a feature request for the maps people.
Cheers, Doug