Actually, you can make an href link for a search. But of course you will have to become familiar with the parameters to the search engine.
In its simplest case, if you want to just link to a "standard" search on a simple target the link would be:
`.../page/search/`[i]target[/i]
but you can also add parameters to the link for instance what search fields, etc.
No documentation on this that I remember but the constructor for the search engine will give you clues. Of course, that requires probably a bit more than even basic PHP to interpret.