It's recommended to embed the standalone search box high up on the main page where it's within the easy access for the site users.
If you are skilled enough in HTML you might shape your own custom search box. The HTML code must contain at least three elements:
You can check what charset encoding your site uses.
A simple example:
<form action="http://affiliates.quintura.com/preview/" method="get" target="_blank"> <input type="text" name="request" /> <input type="submit" value="Search" /> <input type="hidden" name="enc" value="utf-8" /> </form>
And that's how it will look like: