moshu: “btw, the Codex is wrong in the Template Hierarchy saying that if there is no search.php the index.php will be used.”
Was the Codex actually wrong about that? I just deleted the search.php file from my theme, and when I ran a search, it was processed by the index.php file, not the archive.php file, as my archives are (and which is my preference for searches).
Are other people getting different results?