It's used to search their site for products. If you want to buy a "571B Banana Slicer" the easiest way to find it on amazon's site is to use their search.

The search feature being broken translates to sales being close to zero for that time period.

> "571B Banana Slicer"

Wow, turns out that's actually a thing.

Look at it for the novelty, and buy it for the reviews.

'For decades I have been trying to come up with an ideal way to slice a banana. "Use a knife!" they say. Well...my parole officer won't allow me to be around knives....'

You made my day! :-)

You should also check out the "AutoExec Wheelmate Steering Wheel Attachable Work Surface Tray"

I use Amazon search every time I'm on their site (which is very frequently).

to search for things that you want to purchase....

Something like 40% of online shopping searches start on Amazon. In 2012 it was about 15%.

I'm guessing he thinks "Amazon Search" meant A9.com - which used to be Amazons search portal (like google / bing / yahoo).

I actually wrote about A9's existence a few days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11742067

tl;dr, Amazon's product search engine actually is handled mainly at A9. They seem to attract decent talent.

I would have to imagine that a massive corporation like Amazon has automatic detection of issues with tier 1 services like search.

Yes, this would have automatically caused people to get paged in minutes or seconds.

Not everyone arrives from Google.