seach_key only returns values that exist?

I'm using a search box to filter blog posts. I trying to display the entered search term on the search results page.

<perch:search id="search_key" />

This only seems to return anything that already exists on the site. If I enter a word that does not exist on the site, nothing is returned.

Additionally, it will output the search term as many times as it appears on the site. I can fix that with 'count' => 1. Is this how <perch:search id="search_key" /> is designed to work? Are there other options? Perhaps a plain PHP function to decode the query string to be readable?