I have searched twice in a row, and both times got the following message:
The hamsters have been farming it out to moles and tree frogs. They are about to go on strike for more sunflower seed in their feed. Brace yourself. It’s going to get worse.
Try Google with the parameter site:boards.straightdope.com.
What exactly did you search on?
obama “the one”
I can get the same error consistently with that, or similar searches. Searching for smith “the other one” gets a similar error in a different php module:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 79 bytes) in /home/straightdope/boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/includes/class_core.php on line 3223
There was site maintenance going on recently. If it’s not a coincidence, my uneducated guess is that as a result of this maintenance for some reason the memory allocated to PHP has been reduced from what it was set to previously.
Serious answer, this time:
Searches that have a word 3 characters or less fuck up, almost always. VB’s search code can’t deal with 3 letter word searches for reasons that have to do with the size of the index it has to create.
In other words, the hamsters farm it out to moles (blind) and tree frogs (tiny and useless) when you try that.
ETA: In other words, don’t use 3 character words in your searches if you hand it to the board’s hamsters. They can’t handle words that small. Google does better. Use it instead.