Is it only happening to me?
Very often, when I search an artist from the top right indexed search form (or from my stored search URL also I don’t remember), I get an error:
Top right search box
https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=Juliette+Armanet&type=artist&method=indexed
Error:
Sorry, your query “(Juliette Armanet)” does not contain enough information to carry out a search.
(same for any artist)
Then I resubmit once or twice to get the actual results.
Another repro (but also random):
That error, again.
That error, again.
It’s a reandom but frequent error, I get.
Happens to me a lot. Like you said, sometimes you have to hit search 2 or 3 times just for it to work.
I think it’s a same for everyone and related to the load issues. And another thing we can thank all the bots for.
Yep, I’ve been seeing that, too. Although, I think I’ve only seen it on an initial search. Going to page 2, or “back,” I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the error in those cases. Probably just lucky.
Ticks the “me too” box. First search often fails, second usually gets there. Been happening for a while.
Happens all the time to me. Actually, seach/lookup related features work 50% of the time for me which is really something. I understand the need for rate limiting, but this is not the way. Even most userscripts I have will retry until result is there, unlike MB, which requires from user to fix software shortcoming.
As an example I constantly get retry on release group when adding a new release and when searching for track artist.
I have been seeing this frequently too. For the last month or so.
You are lucky if its just last month. I don’t remember MB not functioning like that…
Maybe it’s just the last month that it has become frustratingly common…
We fixed this long standing issue with the search: one of our MB servers was unable to access to the search server, due a misconfiguration in an ACL.
So, depending on which server the search was originating from, the search cluster was returning an error, and when retrying most of the times it was done from another node, so the query was working, giving the impression of randomness.
Woohoo! Thanks very much! 
Amazing. Sometimes I feel bad about complaining about these minor inconveniences, but it sounds like the relevant person didn’t even know there was an issue?
FANTASTIC! Thanks, going to add some releases now - this was really bugging me. Thanks to @jesus2099 for posting about it.