Question

Should I use a HTML5 specific tag for my search on my new site so I can remain semantically correct?
My site’s structure is something like this

--------------------
      Header
--------------------
search   |   nav
--------------------
      article
--------------------
       footer
--------------------

This is my concern mostly because the search plays an important role on this page.

Answer 1

You can use:

<input type="search">

Searching is a way of navigating a website, so you could just add it to the <nav> element.

In this case, the <nav> element could be a child element of the <header>, just like the last example in the spec.

<header>
  <h1>Site title</h1>
  <input type="search" placeholder="Search…">
  <nav>
    …
  </nav>
</header>
<article>
  <h1>Page title</h1>
</article>
<footer>
  …
</footer>