If I go to the web browser on N900 and type "fish and chips" into the box (without the quotes) and press "search", it then loads this URL
http://www.google.com.au/search?clie...IcK0mwXm4IGgAQ

and gives me this error
XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://www.google.com.au/search?clie...IcK0mwXm4IGgAQ
Line Number 2, Column 3837:

Not just this search term but some others too.
Anyone know why this could be happening? Is it a problem on Google's end? Google no longer being compatible with the N900 browser? Something on my N900?

I tried it again just now with all system SW reverted to stock version (i.e. mp-fremantle-generic-pr installed and all versions matching what mp-fremantle-generic-pr wants) and its failing in the same way with the same error so that rules out something to do with microb-engine (which I compiled locally from cssu repo microb-engine source tree)

Not a solution to your problem, rather a workaround:
Have you tried Opera?

@jonwil
I clicked your link
and it showed me the site without any problems.
On N900 with microb.

If I scroll across to where the error message says the error is, it highlights a space character following an & sign. Maybe microb is getting confused by the & sign somehow.

Looks like (since there is no way to get Google to make their backend return & instead of just & and no way to tell Google not to return any "places" results when you search) is to somehow modify the expat parser library inside microb-engine to pretend that an & sign followed by a space is a literal & sign and not something that should be parsed.

Too bad the expat source isn't exactly easy to follow

I changed expat so that the code returns XML_TOK_DATA_CHARS instead of XML_TOK_INVALID for any case where an & sign is followed by a space which seems to make Google work again. Not perfect but hey, it solves my problem.

weird that I am experiencing this problem and others aren't (although I suspect it would depend on whether Google returned any results in the "places" section with an & in them

I can replicate jonwill's error on my N900 when searching for fish and chips. Column number is a little different, but the message is the same: "XML Parsing Error: not well-formed"

Especially weird since I'm a vegetarian . . . which sounds like I'm making a stupid joke, but I tried searching for "hummus and kale" and I got a normal page of search results . . .

So what I thought was a stupid flippant answer actually yields some odd information.