[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. :)