[conflux0]

Just think about it this way. How many people using msnbc will actually make the query that will match the regex "/^wikileaks$/i". If they were truly trying to prevent people from accessing information about it they would have done a better regex.

"It seems pretty obvious to me that their search dept is trying to stop people from finding the story. Either that or their search is broken in a truly bad way--given that those words should stem to the same query, it's suggestive to say the least."

It really doesn't. I'm going to take a big guess here and say that the good people over at MSNBC are not that inept.

[aphyr]

My guess is they're not doing regexes. Someone in charge probably said "Stop people from searching for wikileaks" and they added that term to a hacked-together blocklist ASAP. Either that or they added it to a special list of queries that get extra processing (topic summary for the top of results, perhaps) which was crashing, and deployed without checking the results. Either way, it looks like their search is working now although the error persists, which suggests things over at MSNBC are much in flux. :)

[buster]

My guess is: There is a list of searchterms which now looks like that: 1. Wikileaks 2. Obama 3. Sex 4. Reef 5. Oil . . . 32. wikileak

There is probably a simple "ban this word" textbutton and the person in charge will naturally just ban wikileaks.