Of all the major sites that I visit with frequency, there are non with a more Byzantine URL structure and organization than Amazon.com. I don’t know what kind of back-end infrastructure decision they made years ago, but the whole “obidos” and session number thing really makes it a huge pain to work with the site, and forget about being able to email someone a URL so they can see a product for sale: their URLs are famously bizarre.
But! Don’t panic!
When it comes to their search system, buried in all the junk, there is a parameter that contains the actual search string, so when I go to Amazon.com and simply search for “honda parts” from the home page, the resultant page has the following URL:

Now it’s just a matter of slicing until it fails: what parameters can we axe from this ghastly URL until we get just what we want?
The way I do this is to actually edit the URL within the Address box of my browser (Apple’s Safari) and reload the page each time until it just doesn’t bring up what I seek.
Do that and you’ll quickly find that all the “Go” fields can be safely chopped off. Can we delete the url=search-alias%3Daps value?

Doesn’t even need a line break. Better, you can now see how to add it to your site and how to use it as the wrapper for a button, say:

or just as a hypertext link unto itself:

Hope that helps you work with the Amazon search engine!

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