Vocabulary – Meaning of ‘Shape-Wise’ Explained

Fly against isn’t functioning as a single phrase here.

To fly in this case just means to work, to be successful, with a slight connotation that the risk involves skirting the rules of some authority. Against is in the sense of running an experiment against some configuration of circumstances. So the example could be rephrased:

I’m not sure if running this experiment using today’s Google will work, but it did work in 2004.

Edit: The OED doesn’t document this figurative usage of fly, so it’s presumably not just colloquial but also fairly new. Urban Dictionary does; it’s currently their eighth-ranked definition for it, with a good example:

Don't even try that. It ain’t gonna fly.

The original, literal sense is “to preserve (food) in a can”. Derived from this meaning is the secondary meaning of “stuffing away” or even “firing (from a job)”.

This particular phrase is a highly idiomatic one meaning, “Shut up!”—basically, you’re saying, “Take whatever it is you’re saying, put it into a can, and seal/preserve it there, out of my earshot!”

Oxford Dictionaries definition