Hi Yisrael,
I was able to fix the problem. The issue was two fold. First, I was clearing the repeater data by setting it to an empty array just before I populated it with new data. For some reason this was causing an error. Once I changed that it worked better. However, after changing search terms four or five times, the repeater would display, but just with the generic template info and not with the new data. This appeared to be a robustness issue with the onItemReady function for the repeater. Once I switched to forEachItem the issue went away.
-Eric