How does site search work in Blot?

I started using the Mira template and I saw it had a search.html page and an archives.html page. I wanted to merge them, so I added a search field to the archives page, following all the same logic that's defined in the search page. But the search that I added to the archives page didn't actually work--the JSON data for the page doesn't contain the query parameter when I run the search from archives.html, even though the exact same code works on search.html. Does Blot have a special case for the search.html page of some sort?