Re: But now they say they didn't find . . .
Really? Of course a few of us knew they wouldn't - it's sort of like looking for the Cheshire cat. It's more or less a definition of the vacuum. It's a deus-ex-machina to explain how a - necessarily massless - gauge theory can describe massive things.
Do you have a link?
BTW the "color" theory (chromodynamics, QCD) of the strong interactions is on better theoretical footing than the electro-weak theory where the Higgs boson is needed. In QCD the gauge fields (gluons) are actually massless and spontaneous symmetry breaking is not required. Having said that, you still can't calculate much of anything with it and it has an even more intractable issue, quark confinement (still unproven theoretically).