The main Search box on eBay.com was down for 5 hours Wednesday evening. Users who entered a search term on the home page and hit the "Find It" button were taken right back to the home page.

A recent change may have contributed to searchers' frustration during the feature outage. eBay recently removed the Search tab immediately above the Search box from all pages of the site, and added a box to the top right of the page (which was not affected by the glitch). At the time, many users complained about the change and reported difficulty in figuring out how to do advanced searches.

Wednesday's outage ran from 6:12 PT to 11:15 PT. eBay first reported the problem on its Systems Announcement Board at 11:10 PT.

Update: On Thursday, it appeared that search boxes on at least some affiliate sites were not bringing back results. Instead, users were taken either to the main eBay site or to eBay's search page.

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml#2004-11-17232130