I was not entirely sure about the this seperation myself as it is a quite radical interface change. But on the plus side it allows the ever growing special metadata search area to grow without any messy scrolling. It would also be possible to add shortcut buttons like clearing the autocomplete cache at a prominent space and would allow to make the cache permanent. And not seperating new search and search results does not really ease up the compressed first screen at all as it does not resolve the conflict of the filter area with the search input form.