Special characters cause error results

Whenever the search query contains some special characters, the results are an error message rather than an ad.  Here's the message:

5 : XML Parse error.
XML Error Text: "; nested exception is: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference.".

For this ad, the request query was “(black & gold, steelers, … )”