ASP.Net is designed around the idea of pages posting back to themselves. You actually have to go out of your way to do otherwise.

The difficulty in your situation is if you want to modify those search parameters in the QueryString for each new search. ASP.Net wants to treat a URL with a different QueryString like a new request for the page instead of a postback to the same one (in which case it would preserve and rebuild the state of the page and the event to call server-side in hidden VIEWSTATE form variables), so it doesn't let you just modify the QueryString and postback. You have to instead go through the trouble of rebuilding the QueryString yourself and calling Response.Redirect().

I do think there's a misunderstanding by Lincoln of the magic ASP.net is doing behind the scenes here. It's understandable given his desktop VB background. I came at ASP.Net after doing plain old HTML form processing with Perl and CGI, so I knew there had to be something keeping state for me and rebuilding object trees server side and routing "events" via hidden form variables.

But it's definitely geared towards "application" style design rather than "website" design.

PS: The ASP.Net style design would have been to ditch the StartSearch.aspx page and just have a single Search.aspx page that only enables the results grid and does the DB work if there is content in the search textbox.