How can I add an Amazon search box to my web page?

Of course it's possible! Everything is possible on the Web. :-)

My first step is to go to Amazon.com and do a search, just to see the resultant URL. In this case, a search for Harry Potter reveals this scary URL:

Way more than I ever want to explore, but I can't help be curious what happens if I clean up everything except the actual search pattern, producing the following shorter URL:

Ulp. Cut out too much and it doesn't work. Instead, let's work on getting rid of that ugly ref value. This URL does work:

a tiny bit more experimentation and we learn that a slightly shorter URL will work too:

Now we can reverse engineer the URL and turn it into a form. Everything before the "?" is the action of the form, and everything after is in name=value form, with those pairs separated by an "&" symbol. Tiny additional nuance: the "%3D" in the URL is an encoded "=" symbol, so we'll want to change that back as part of the code writing process. This means that the following should work:

Sure enough, it does. Try it here:

I admit, it's not the prettiest form we could create, but functionality-wise, I hope you can see how as with the other search boxes I've duplicated here, this is more a detective job than an HTML coding job.

Tip: Want to have the search results open in a new window? Add the attribute target="new" to the FORM line.