In the case of a search service disruption the status updates will be shown here.
05 Jun 26: there was an initial issue with v7.8.1 release because the newer protocol server version was taken by google chrome from cache rather than downloaded for real so I reversed the release temporarily since it got me confused until I figured out the banal cause.
you cannot search by few frequent words alone (i remember about 10), you can use them in search expressions, but you also need at least one search word in such a way which would narrow the most common words so the number of results won't amount to almost whole usenet universe.