Maybe a better suited choice for errors than an insulting message: when I provided a query in my native language it regurgitated the error "needs to be a word" instead of more acceptable "not a supported language".
When you claim that a word in some other culture is not "a word", just because it's not recognized by your machine, that's demeaning to say the least.
Again it's a one man hobby project, I don't have a team of people to go through every formulation and every error message to ensure nobody can read them in a way that offends them. It's just me, writing code on an unfinished project that HN discovered.
In this case, the code doesn't match the word regexp, like it may be a @TwitterHandle or a "comp.lang.c" with periods in it, or an unsupported Unicode range. It doesn't know why it is not matching, just that it doesn't.
I must congratulate you on this achievement. That's certainly a useful take on search.
Nonetheless, even when coding, one should also consider thoroughly the UX and how it would be addressing the others.
Saying "unsupported word" is much more sympathetic than "needs to be a word" (where you define what a "word" is, and the general user is unaware of such definition).
When you claim that a word in some other culture is not "a word", just because it's not recognized by your machine, that's demeaning to say the least.