One of my first frustrations with Drupal was that I could not seem to get the search module to work. I searched my new Drupal site again and again and was irked to find that each search returned the unhelpful response, "Your search yielded no results."
After searching the forums, I realized out that the search module only works if you have set up a cron job on your server for cron.php. The easiest way to do this via Dreamhost is to go to the control panel (panel.dreamhost.com). Here are the steps to take once there: