Building a search page isn't as straight forward as you'd think. At first a client will want something which users can search content, then they may want to modify the search results or even change the ranking of certain content. Long story short, something you thought would be as simple as enabling a module, ends up taking twice as long.

If you need to create custom search pages in Drupal 7, more often than not, you use Search API or create a search page using Views. But the core Search module for Drupal 8 has become more powerful than in Drupal 7. One of the big changes, for site builders, in Drupal 8 is the ability to create custom search pages.

However, there're a few limitations to creating a search page. First, it'll have a prefix of "search/" in front but the full URL can be changed by creating a URL alias. Second, you can only adjust the content ranking on these pages. If you want to index extra fields or remove ones from being indexed, you'll still need Search API to do this.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a custom search page and how to modify the search results by overriding a template.