Display A Count of Search Results in Drupal 7

If you've searched for anything online, you're probably familiar with the handy "number of results" counter that's often displayed alongside the matching documents. You know -- that nice "Displaying results 11–20 of 196"? Somehow, Drupal 7's core Search module still doesn't doesn't include that information on its standard results page!

A lot of sites handle search with Apache Solr or use Search API to display search results in a View, and both make it easier to show a result count. For simple sites without many nodes, the core Search works just fine… except for the glaring omission of a result count. I wanted a quick solution, and I found one that worked for me.

The best method I tried is to sneak a peak at the pager information. For any pager displayed—be it for search results or a View of blog posts or nodes promoted to the front page with no Views at all—the total number of items is stored in a global variable. This way, Drupal can determine the total number of pages in the set, so that it knows where to take you when you click the "Last" page link. This is an imperfect solution, but it was the best I've found. I started with Eric London's 2009 post for Drupal 6, and made some improvements from there. For example, the format of displayed result count depends on the total number of results:

• 1: "Displaying 1 result"
• 2 to 10 (one page): "Displaying 5 results"
• 11 and above (multiple pages): "Displaying 11 - 20 of 44 results"

There are three steps to add this result count to the page:

1. Add a preprocess hook. I won't get into the details of preprocess hooks here (you can learn more about that from Drupalize.me). Open template.php in your theme directoy, and paste in the preprocess code provided below. Replace "THEMENAME" with the name of your theme.

2. Copy search-results.tpl.php into your theme directory. You'll find the original in modules/search. Leave that intact and make a copy.

3. Print the result code in the template. Edit your copy of search-results.tpl.php to print the search result count wherever you want. I put mine right below the "Search results" header tag.

<?php print $search_totals; ?>

Preprocess code

  
/**
 * Implements hook_preprocess_search_results().
 */
function THEMENAME_preprocess_search_results(&$vars) {
  // search.module shows 10 items per page (this isn't customizable)
  $itemsPerPage = 10;

  // Determine which page is being viewed
  // If $_REQUEST['page'] is not set, we are on page 1
  $currentPage = (isset($_REQUEST['page']) ? $_REQUEST['page'] : 0) + 1;

  // Get the total number of results from the global pager
  $total = $GLOBALS['pager_total_items'][0];

  // Determine which results are being shown ("Showing results x through y")
  $start = (10 * $currentPage) - 9;
  // If on the last page, only go up to $total, not the total that COULD be
  // shown on the page. This prevents things like "Displaying 11-20 of 17".
  $end = (($itemsPerPage * $currentPage) >= $total) ? $total : ($itemsPerPage * $currentPage);

  // If there is more than one page of results:
  if ($total > $itemsPerPage) {
    $vars['search_totals'] = t('Displaying !start - !end of !total results', array(
      '!start' => $start,
      '!end' => $end,
      '!total' => $total,
    ));
  }
  else {
    // Only one page of results, so make it simpler
    $vars['search_totals'] = t('Displaying !total !results_label', array(
      '!total' => $total,
      // Be smart about labels: show "result" for one, "results" for multiple
      '!results_label' => format_plural($total, 'result', 'results'),
    ));
  }
}

If you'd like a core solution for the search result count, consider rolling a patch on this old issue. The last attempt was nearly four years ago, so you may need to start from scratch. Feature freeze for Drupal 8 was just pushed back to Feb 18, so you've got time to get it done!