When I got back home I looked at my remote again, and sure enough, there is a button at the top that has a little circle with a stick on it...you guessed it, the universal icon for the SEARCH button.
So, there is a SEARCH button on the remote already; yet, in their infinite wisdom, the brain trust at the xfinity development group decided that no one would want to use that, so instead we'll decide for everyone that a numeric keypad that has been used to enter channel numbers for, again, decades, should instead be a universal search pad.
Sorry...this post is getting a little snarky. But, I work in the technology arena and I see this all the time. Some developer thought it would be clever if the numeric keypad could be used as a universal search tool. He took great pride in mapping the numbers to their alphanumeric characters and the took even greater pride, and in fact, probably spent months boasting to his peers about how his awesome algorithm efficiently took all the letters in the number combination and created every possible combination and then "intelligently" used some AI to determine which of those were most likely matches and pruned the list and...oh, boy. What that clever engineer NEVER did, however, is ever ask if anyone actually wanted the keypad to work that way. He decided for us.
>> End of Snarkiness...at least, for now<<