Ed is something like the third person to write as Cecil. The others had fairly short stints compared to Ed.
Mike Lenehan was the original Cecil, starting in 1973. Dave Kehr was Cecil from 1976-1978.
Ed Zotti’s been Cecil since 1978. That’s not the beginning, but it’s still 30 long years. If the two haven’t fused in his mind, he more compartmentalized than most humans.
Mike Lenehan, BTW, became executive editor of the Chicago Reader. Still was as of last year, but I can’t find this year’s information. As Original Cecil, he may have some latent nostalgia for the Dope.
Or not.
As someone pointed out earlier, search is a feature that was used to get people to pay for posting. Enabling Google indexing would open search to everyone.
Ahhh, I didn’t see that mentioned. On the other hand, I think disabling search is not a good way to encourage subscriptions. The ability to post messages is what most people are willing to pay for. And it’s a benefit to the community especially for guests to be able to search, so they can see if a topic has already been discussed before firing off a new thread.
At least allow Google to index GQ and CCC. That would attract new members, I would think, and allow guests to search for earlier versions of GQ questions. Then members still get the perk of being able to search the other forums.
So it’s been more than “a day or so” since Search was disabled - any word?
Didn’t “Cecil” stop popping in when the board outlawed any kind of sock-even joke ones, like Lynn’s “Vinnie”?
No, Cecil has been in the house once within the last few months that I recall. I’d search for it, but… 
Yes Ed writes under the pseudonym as Cecil. Blah, blah, blah.
I was surprised to learn that Ed wasn’t even an employee of the Reader staff (http://www.chicagoreader.com/readerinc/staff.html ) No wonder we never get anything done.
Yes, it would be an explicit change in the business model. vBulletin has tons of features that can be enabled for paying members, and which we could afford to enable, if search was offloaded to companies who specialize in it. You didn’t pay that much for your membership here. This isn’t the first time in the history of the Internet that a premium service was made free because it made more sense that way.
Wait. You mean there’s no Cecil Adams? Like there’s no Santa Claus? 
No he’s a fictional character who is written by a funny, but smart, guy Ed Zotti.
Damn.
They may use other methods as well, but they definitely have a robots.txt file. Here it is as of a couple minutes ago.
What this means is if you’re the Mediapartners-Google* bot(s) nothing is disallowed to you. If you have any other user-agent, every document under this domain is disallowed to you. The Mediapartners-Google bot(s) are used to parse the content for the data necessary to create the targeted ad-words advertisements at the bottom of most pages.
Enjoy,
Steven
Hey, what happened to the spoilers. Geez! 
At least there’s still the Easter Bunny.
Ha!
You can’t fool me.
There ain’t no Sanity Clause!
If BoardReader doesn’t work well enough for you, you can also create a local copy of the SDMB and point Google Desktop (or any desktop search app) at it. This is easiest on Linux, where wget is installed by default and can be used like so:
This creates a local copy of the archives, which is much easier on the hamsters.
It certainly won’t be easier on the hamsters if everyone does it, let me tell you that. Blimey. Use BoardReader please (terrible though it is), or it won’t just be search that gets disabled.
Back when I first joined, running scripts on the SDMB was grounds for banning. I haven’t seen that rule mentioned in a while, but I haven’t seen it explicitly discontinued either.