Called my friend to ask if he could search anything either, same error.
And then he checked Twitter and found someone else noticed it too (https://twitter.com/hiyelbaz/status/1463087372070002690).
Did I just affect NPM globally with an odd query string?
RESOLVED (21:40+11:00): web search works again - maybe I caught an odd moment of downtime after a odd search string.
EDIT: added time EDIT2: added resolved