Maybe this webmaster forum http://www.webmastersun.com matches your question?
it has 3 columns with photo (avatar of member) and title of post and it looks like a news site. If that, you can need a custom code to have same homepage.
Other than that, you will not find any settings in vB to have that.
You directed someone to a custom vB4 site to answer a question about vB5. The two are entirely different in their capabilities. A three column layout can be accomplished in vB5 just by using the built-in layouts in SiteBuilder. The search modules can be configured to do anything a developer wants. This is all possible without custom coding.