USR369 said the tool was "definitely working now" after his own tweaks; re-tested more thoroughly than the earlier one-word-query smoke test and found query=handoff (very common word) returned HTTP 200 with a completely empty body -- no error, no JSON at all. Root cause: search() built a snippet from raw extracted file content and passed it straight to json_encode() with no encoding safety; json_encode() returns false (silently) on any array containing invalid UTF-8 bytes, and echoing false produces an empty string. Some of the 261 extracted old files are not clean UTF-8 (legacy encodings from Feb 2026 era files). Fixed two ways: (1) added JSON_INVALID_UTF8_SUBSTITUTE flag to every json_encode() call in the file (11 total) so encoding issues degrade to substitution characters instead of failing outright, (2) added mb_convert_encoding($snippet, "UTF-8", "UTF-8") on the snippet itself as a second layer before it ever reaches json_encode. Re-tested query=handoff (25 results, correct), query=governance (25, still correct), query=master (25, correct), ping (unchanged, clean).