Hi,
Sorry for the delayed response. Sometimes we miss a post....
If you want to include a search box on your site, you can put the <portal:SearchInput control in the layout.master file of your skin.
Example if you wanted to include it on the left side of your site. The bolded text is all you need to add, the other text is just shown to demonstrate where you need to add the SearchInput control:
<asp:Panel id="divLeft" runat="server" cssclass="leftside" visible="True" SkinID="pnlPlain">
<portal:SearchInput id="SearchInput2" LinkOnly="false" RenderAsListItem="false" runat="server" />
<portal:PageMenu id="PageMenu1" runat="server" UseTreeView="true" TreeViewShowExpandCollapse="true" />
<a id="startcontent"></a>
<asp:contentplaceholder ID="leftContent" runat="server"></asp:contentplaceholder>
</asp:Panel>
HTH,
Joe D.