Problem

I have a page on my site where I need to do additional searching within that page. I am using the default way of WordPress searching with <?php get_search_form(); ?> for my main header search, which works great.

I created another HTML form on my page, not using the default PHP method, for the additional searching like so:

<form action="<?php bloginfo('siteurl'); ?>" id="searchform" method="get">
    <div>
        <label for="s" class="screen-reader-text">Search for:</label>
        <input type="text" id="s" name="s" value="" />
        <input type="hidden" name="post_type" value="photo_group" /> 
        <input type="submit" value="Search" id="searchsubmit" />
    </div>
</form>

I use the type=hidden for getting the custom post type that I want to search through:

<input type="hidden" name="post_type" value="photo_group" />

which gives me a link that looks similar to:

http://mywebsite.com/?s=search&post_type=photo_group

Question

When I use the new search form created on the page, it uses the default search.php to display the results. How can I display the search results of the custom post type search, lets say in a div on the same page?

I’ve tried creating a new page template that would display the results with no success, could this be the right way of doing it and I just did it wrong?

*Edit*

I’m trying the solution of sanchothefat. Does this look right? This is my whole div for my search results and search query.

<div id="photo-search">
    <h2>Search Photos:</h2>
    <form action="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" id="searchform" method="get">
        <div>
            <label for="s" class="screen-reader-text">Search for:</label>
            <input type="text" id="search" name="search" value="" />
            <input type="hidden" name="post_type" value="photo_group" /> 
            <input type="submit" value="Search" id="searchsubmit" />
        </div>
    </form>

    <?php if( isset( $_REQUEST['search'] ) ) {
        query_posts( array(
        's' => $_REQUEST['search'],
        'post_type' => $_REQUEST['photo_group'],
        'paged' => $paged
        ));

        if( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) :
            the_title();
            the_content();                      
        endwhile; endif;

        wp_reset_query(); 
        }
    ?>
</div>

I get 404 error page not found when running through the search.

The simplest option if you want to show search results within a page context you’ll need to do a custom loop, otherwise you won’t be able to access the page information.

Change the input with the name s to something else like search or q to stop wordpress from doing it’s usual built in search.

Next change the form action parameter to the current page’s URL. You can use <?php get_permalink(); ?> for that.

The loop you need to do is as follows:

<?php
    if ( isset( $_REQUEST[ 'search' ] ) ) {
          // run search query
          query_posts( array(
             's' => $_REQUEST[ 'search' ],
             'post_type' => $_REQUEST[ 'post_type' ],
             'paged' => $paged
             )
          );

        // loop
        if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) :
            // loop through results here
        endwhile; endif;

        // return to original query
        wp_reset_query();
    }
?>