While writing my tutorial series about how to use Google, I noticed that there are several different search boxes you can type on that lead to Google's search results page. For reference, I'm listing them here.
1. The Search Box on Google's Website
If you go to Google's website (https://www.google.com/), you'll find Google's iconic search box in the middle of the webpage. Typing on it and pressing the enter key, or pressing the button "Google Search" will search on Google.
2. The Search Box in Smartphones
Some smartphones have a widget in their homescreens that resembles Google's search box, and surely enough typing on it searches on Google. This widget comes from an official Google app called Google Go. When you search using this box, or when you open an app labelled "Google" in your smartphone, it opens the app Google Go. It doesn't open your web browser, nor does it visit Google's website. So beware that the way Google, the app, may not work exactly the same way as Google, the website.
You can also open Google, the website, through your web browser in your smartphone if you want.
As Search Engine of a Web Browser
Modern web browsers can be configured to use a search engine in various locations of their interface. Some of them, like Google Chrome, come with Google configured as their search engine by default.
When doing any of the things below, the browser just goes to Google's search results page, just as if you had typed what you wanted to find in Google's website.
3. The Search Box of the Web Browser
Traditionally, web browsers had an address bar that displayed the URL and a separate box that you used to search for things.
4. The Address Bar of the Web Browser
In most modern web browsers, the address bar performs two functions according to the following algorithm: if you type a URL, the browser just visits that URL, but if what you type doesn't look like a URL, then the address bar works as a search box, and just searches for what you typed in Google (or whatever search engine you have configured).
This new design is officially called an omnibox, but nobody actually seems to call it that. I just call it the address bar.
5. The Search Box in a New Tab in the Web Browser
In some web browsers, when you open a new tab, you'll see a search box right in the middle of the page. In Google Chrome, this "new tab page" looks very similar to Google's homepage, but it includes information that Google, the website, wouldn't have, and therefore wouldn't be able to display if you accessed the actual website, such as the shortcuts you have saved in your browser, that are displayed right under the search box.
6. In The Context Menu in the Web Browser
In some web browsers, such as Google Chrome, you can click and drag on text in a webpage to select it, then right click to show the context menu, and there will be a 'Search Google For "..."' menu item that you can click on to search on Google for the text you just selected. It will work just like typing it, but you won't need to type it, or even copy and paste the text.
7. The Search Page URL
Finally, there is one last way to search on Google, that I suppose nobody is actually going to do: just type the URL for the search results page directly.
When you search on Google, your browser goes to a URL such as https://www.google.com/search?q=What%20you%20searched%20for. So you could just type that into the address bar and it would work.
This is also how all of the things we saw above with web browsers work. The web browsers can easily show you the search page of a search engine because all they need to do is construct a URL that starts with https://www.google.com/search?q= and ends with what you want to search percent-encoded. See How Search Forms Work on the Web for details.
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