I'm noticing my searches are often timing out this morning, or extremely laggy. When they lag, the bottom says loading from pics.geocities.com. I'm running a noscript, and my machine is clean (to the best of my knowledge of course), using firefox. I see no reason why an item search would need to hit geocities. I'm a registered user, and I'm logged in, so its not a banner.
Hope this info helps!