Preview Crashes Repeatedly on Yosemite 10.10.1
I'm glad that you hesitated to reinstall the OS because of problems with one app. I saw this on 10.10.1 and actually it has gotten worse on 10.10.2. It's not search per se, but just opening certain kinds of PDFs that have been cropped using a Java-based tool called "Briss" (which converts 2-up scans to 1-up).

I think that this is a Yosemite bug that hasn't been fixed yet. PDFPen from Smile Software does not crash when viewing these PDFs.