searching Gmane questions

[myglc2]

Gmane used to provide search to which I became highly addicted ;-)

But 'G G' on a gmane group has produced errors like this ...

open-network-stream: search.gmane.org/80 Name or service not known

... for over a year :-(

Also, the gmane blog http://home.gmane.org has not been updated for over
a year. Is there any reason to believe that gmane search will start
working again?

Am I correct in believing that gmane was unique amount NNTP servers in
providing a search interface, and that the interface between gnus and
gmane was a custom thing?

Or is there a standard way to search NNTP servers that I am missing?

TIA - George