Sometimes front end search stops working

[bzeltzer]

I've been have occasional problems where search results show incomplete queries from one minute to the next. Sometimes, it'll stop showing products and just show category pages. I don't often use the front end search so I don't know how often this happens. I do know that it lasts for a few minutes then goes away before I get through to support. I always take screen shots but they don't seem to be able to do anything with that. I've linked the screenshots below. Has anyone else seen anything like this? Do you have any idea of what might be going on?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...221_140885.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...221_150852.jpg

Also, here's a screen cast I took a while back when it happened. Tech supoort couldn't figure it out.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/266846/search.m4v

[elightbox]

Try restoring the default search page and see if that makes any difference. It looks like there are results on the blank page, but two sections are not displaying. Maybe a javascript conflict or such!

[bzeltzer]

Thanks for the reply. Since I don't regularly search the front end, I don't know the actual frequency, but it's something that happens occasionally and resolves itself after 10 to 15 minutes. When we've caught it happening, it can be observed on multiple computers, geographic locations, operating systems and browsers. I don't think it's anything in my site code because it goes away by itself (before anyone in a high enough tech support position can trouble shoot it). I'm assuming that it must have something to do with a database or server or something like that but that's outside of my expertise. Tech support has told me that they see nothing in the logs. I'm only concerned about it because I can't guess at the frequency or how it's affecting my conversion rate. I'm hoping for some thoughts here that I might bring to tech support to help them think outside of the box a bit. So far, they've told me that they can't figure it out.