What SEARCH does
SEARCH locates one piece of text inside another and returns the starting position as a number. Unlike FIND, SEARCH is not case-sensitive and can work with wildcard characters.
Practical examples
Find text without worrying about case
=SEARCH("margin",A2)
If A2 contains Profit Margin, the result is 8 regardless of the letter case used in the formula.
Start searching from a later position
=SEARCH("-",A2,5)
This skips earlier characters and looks for the next match after position 5.
Common mistakes and notes
SEARCH is not case-sensitive
If you need uppercase and lowercase to be treated differently, use FIND instead.
Wildcards can change the result
SEARCH supports wildcard characters such as * and ?, which is useful but easy to forget when debugging.
Missing text returns an error
If no match is found, SEARCH returns #VALUE!. Use IFERROR if the formula should fall back cleanly.