That might work with ebay auctions, because the 
fact that everyone in here uses english, or at 
least the arabic alphabet can easily cut and 
paste text for ebay auctions.  

Yahoo Japan on the other hand (or plenty of other 
sites with japanese text) is a little more 
complicated.  I can read/understand a little 
japanese, which probably puts me a little ahead 
of some of the other regulars on this board, but 
unfortunately, my computer won't let me install 
japanese into it so I really CAN'T read it, 
nevermind be able to put in a search for 
something I could easily write out in hirigana or 
katakana.  In that case, people saying 'oh, such-
and-such is on yahoo japan doesn't do me any good 
at all.  There have been plenty of posts where 
people are like 'oooo did you see that really 
cool ____ on YJ?' and I just *wish* someone would 
post a link, even though the pages won't load 
half the time anyway.

Besides, plenty of people answer 'where can I 
find this series/character' with, for example,  
a 'I saw some at anime taro' which isn't much 
different than writing out animetaro.com, is it?  

So long as people aren't just URL spamming, but 
are giving links as a response to a specific 
question, I think it's probably more helpful than 
just saying 'I saw some at so-and-so's site' 
which may not help some people at all.