UPDATE (An hour after this post)
I finally managed to find shore stores in 90210. I am happy to report that the technical difficulties have finally disappeared. And for the first time ever I am able to use the site as intended. Hurrah! 

Earlier this year, I saw a presentation titled YELLOWPAGES.COM: Behind the Curtain on InfoQ. The presentation "explains how YELLOWPAGES.COM, one of the highest-traffic websites in the U.S., was written using Ruby on Rails, how it was scaled to handle the traffic and how the software architecture evolved. Also: the reasons for choosing Ruby on Rails."

On the day I saw the presentation, I searched for "shoes" in "90210" and the instead of returning some shoe related results in our favourite postcode, it returned an error. Infact I tried various other search options on the site throughout the day and received the same error everytime. I put that down to some technical glitch as explained on the error page.

Some weeks later I tried again and it threw the same error page to me, apologising for the "technical difficulties". Again I didn't think much of it and moved on in search of shoes elsewhere.

Today I visited the site again in the hope of locating some shoe shops in my favourite postcode. No prizes for guessing but I didn't get any results. I got the same apologetic error page. It didn't seem right, so I revisited the presentation page on InfoQ hoping some people would have commented on the broken site. Sure enough I saw several comments about the site outage issue. Seems like I am not the only one seeing errors.

This time though, I sent a comment enquiring about how long the technical difficulties would last. I am hoping to receive a perfectly rational explanation of why the error messages kept appearing.

PS: Don't ask me why I was so interested in finding shoe stores in Beverly Hills. Call it research?