A discussion about adding a search bar to a website’s Google search results page. The original poster, frold, wants to know how to change the layout of their website’s search results on Google to include a search bar. vinothkannans suggests adding code to the <head> tag and configuring site links through Google Webmaster tools.
Joffreyjaffeux provides a code snippet to add to the body of a theme component, which may work, but only Google can decide if it will show. Joffreyjaffeux also suggests making this a default feature, which is met with mixed opinions.
Some users, like 8BIT and hustler, think it’s a great idea, while others, like featheredtoast, think it might not be suitable for private sites. codinghorror is skeptical about the usefulness of this feature, but fefrei argues that people do search for website names.
Frold tries the code snippet and waits for Google to update. Jon_M shares his findings using Google’s Rich Results Test, which shows that some Discourse URLs already have the necessary markup.
Hey,
This is the content you see at google when you search at my site (I know you might not understand the text):
This is how it look if you e.g search at “Lægeforeningen”.
How to change the layout at google to e.g include a search bar for my site and nice layout then the “random” text at the moment?
I dont know anything about SEO 
Are there anything I can do ?
For search box you may need to add some code inside <head> tag as suggested here Latest Google Search Documentation Updates | Google Search Central | What's new | Google for Developers. And I think site links need to be configured via Google Webmaster tools.
The URL of a search in discourse has the following format:
https://your.domain.tld/search?q=test
So I think if you added this to the body of a theme component (the only thing you have to change is your.domain.tld):
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "WebSite",
"url": "https://your.domain.tld/",
"potentialAction": {
"@type": "SearchAction",
"target": "https://your.domain.tld/search?q={search_term_string}",
"query-input": "required name=search_term_string"
}
}
</script>
It could eventually work, bear in mind, that in the end only google is deciding if this will show or not, so you could add this code and it would do nothing.
@sam we might want consider doing this by default what do you think ?
I think it’s in body, do you see somewhere it’s saying <head> ?
this would be pretty badass if it was on by default…
Yes it can be placed in body. Pinterest also placed it in body only.
It definitely sounds like a pretty cool feature for public sites, but I’d just like to caution that it would look weird on private ones. My preference would be to have it off by default, or have the ability to turn it off for private sites.
Now I did try to to add that snippet.
We will see if google eat it and it will add a search bar
Any way thanks for the help!
I kind of like it, @codinghorror what do you think?
AFAICT, the sitelinks generally display in the SERPs when the search terms are more “general”.
For example a search for “Discourse meta” shows sitelinks. But a search for “discourse seo search bar google” will not have them under the link to this topic, nor under the same Discourse meta link after it that had them for the more general search.
Kind of like “give me the table of contents” vs “give me this page”
I dunno we already have this
<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="https://meta.discourse.org/opensearch.xml" title="Discourse Meta Search">
Are people really going to be searching for the name of the site? That seems like a rare edge condition to me, not something we want to add permanent markup for.
Yes, people do this all the time. They do it because they don’t know what a URL is or how to create a bookmark – it’s simply their way to open any website.
This is somewhat sad, but surprisingly true 
I think this is a really good addition and unique point of difference. It highlights the site in search results, it stands more a chance of being used than being absent considering seems like a trivial update to make.
Have anyone tried this and got results? 
I’d like to see something like this for Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. 
I was looking into this and came across Google’s Rich Results Test (https://search.google.com/test/rich-results). I noticed by putting a few discourse URLs through the tester they all seemed to have the results mentions in Joffrey’s response above.
YMMV but I figured I would share my findings
