You may be seeing something that in my mind is not nessecarialy a bug but rather behaviour that is not intuititve. That is, it might be by design.

What I saw: In normal mode (not full screen), show both the Places and Layers panes. Next, start a search that returns results.

GE will partially collapse the Layers and Places panes to make room for the search results. The collapse is always proportional. If Places took up 30% of the Total space used by both the Places and Layers panes before your search, it will take up that amount after the search window opens -- but with the new total space allocated to the Places and Layers panes.

You can test that by immediately closing the Search results (hit Clear) without changing heights of either the places pane or layers pane. Do not attempt to resize the search results. Just clear them.