http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Search_Page#Display_Total_Results

This won’t work. The point is to find out the total number of results matching the query — not the number currently fetched. If there are more results than “fits” within a page, your code will only get number of elements on a page.

    global $wp_query;
    $count = sizeof( $wp_query->posts );
    echo"<pre>";
    //var_dump($wp_query);// The WP Query Object
    var_dump($wp_query->posts); // The WP Query Object's 'posts' property (note the plural)
    echo"</pre>";

If you drop that snippet in your search template, it will output the properties of the ‘$wp_query’ variable, specifically the ‘posts’ property of the object. This is an array that stores a collection of the returned posts from the search query, which you can do a number of things with once you access it, including (*drumroll*), *count* the number of posts in that array using either PHP’s ‘count()’ or ‘sizeof()’ functio

I see Konstantin has some point about the query, but the comments “ate” the results!

But I don’t want to hate, this is how it should be done (in my humble opinion):


post_count); ?>