Chances are that you’ve already seen the Google Sitelinks search box in-action already. Google has put it into motion around the same time they announced the retirement of the Google Web Search API. The Sitelinks search box allows you to search through your site of choice without actually visiting the site – which may be a bit convenient for the searcher however not necessarily that great for the webmaster of the website.
So what do you do if you don’t want Google to show a search box within your results’ sitelinks? A few days ago Google announced a brand new meta tag that will allow you to tell Google to disable the search box:
This will disable the sitelinks search box as part of the normal Googlebot crawling and processing of the site – which can take a few weeks – so don’t expect this result to be instant if a search box is already appearing for your site.