Holy wow. I just had to chime in before 2014 ended that using a third party launcher is a totally valid way to remove the Google Search crap that gets pre-installed on android devices now.
What I would not recommend to a newbie, or even most regular users, is installing a ROM (read: voiding the warranty) because some nincompoop on the Internet told you it was a good idea. And I would have assumed that since we have established the problem is easily fixable, I'd also advise anybody reading this in the future to not just ignore the problem either. Whichever nitwit actually assumed the Google launcher is always fastest probably hasn't tried any of the most recent ones. Shop around, this is Android not Apple for goodness sake. We can shop around instead of just buying the rhetoric.
I'ma archive this last guy's replies for, umm, archival purposes. Gloat for a while that my crappy OEM skin never came with a search bar, maybe?