I don't want to use a bunch of widgets. I want to search Amazon's catalog automatically and possibly do some contextual matching to my articles on this site and others.

At Amazon's web site, I didn't find any ready to go examples in PHP that I could upload to my server and test out without having to do a lot of reading first.

I did find a useful and well documented example from CodeDiesel called Accessing Amazon Product Advertising API and it gets the job done with very little configuration - all you have to do is change three lines of the code to use your login credentials.

The program let's you query the Amazon catalog for search terms and it returns information about products including images and links. You can even restrict your search to different product categories like Electronics, or Books. 

Use this program if you want to jump start your usage of the Amazon Product Advertising API.