OK, Steve - I took the bait, and clicked on your link to search within HZ for "fox". It came up with "about 584" hits in 0.14 seconds. Of course, my handle isn't so unique - every reference to the TV Network and the President of Mexico also came up (for all I know, there's a mention or two of 20th Century Fox, too). Putting "news" and "Vincenti" in the "without the words" field in the advanced search form reduced the hit count to 544 (and didn't exclude one in which El Presidente Fox's first name was misspelled).

So far, the drawbacks I can see to using Google are:

-- Because a thread's contents are listed beneath every post in the thread, a search for any one poster's handle will return a separate hit for every post in any thread that person joined, regardless of author. I ran a content keyword search - site:www.habitablezone.com Jupiter; 64 hits in 0.33 sec - and found the expected similar phenomenon: every thread that contains the keyword in a post title returns one hit for each post in the thread, relevant or not.

-- Google can't sort by date of origination. The results I got were spread pretty randomly over the HabZone timeline.

Sure, it's better than nothing - and I expect Robert to come up with something to help Google's spiders find the back pages more easily - but it's still only Google. I can easily envision some folks here (hi, Tom) getting pretty serious about searching old posts (their own as well as others') to bolster a current discussion. "Googling the Zone" may make that easier than methodically paging back - but not much.