The Search widget adds a search box to your blog sidebar or footer, allowing readers to easily search your site for posts and pages you’ve written in the past. Here’s an example of what it looks like in the Rowling theme:

Note: Some themes have a search bar built into the header. In this case, if there is no option to remove it in My Sites → Themes, it is not removable. If you have the Premium or Business upgrade, you can hide it using CSS.

Settings

Once you add the widget to your sidebar from Customizer → Widgets, you’ll see that you can customize the title (i.e. Can’t Find What You’re Looking For?):

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What It Searches

The Search widget will return results from the titles and the bodies of your posts and pages, and from media titles, alt text, file names, and single image captions. It will not return results from widgets, comments, categories, gallery captions or other text, or tags.

Also, note that the search results will display posts with the matching term in the post title in reverse-chronological order. Then, it will display posts with the matching term in the post body in reverse-chronological order. So for example, if you have just published a post about Michigan titled “This Weekend,” and you also have an older post titled “Michigan,” searching for ‘michigan’ will display that older post at the top of the list.

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