a) To look in (a place) for something.
I searched the garden for the keys and found them in the vegetable patch.
b) To look thoroughly.
The police are searching for evidence in his flat.
With only five minutes until we were meant to leave, the search for the keys started in earnest.
b) The act of searching in general.
Search is a hard problem for computers to solve efficiently
See Also: research
Wikipedia foundation.