We don't have a Joomla smart search plugin. That search plugin is for Joomla's legacy search component, which works on Joomla 4, but I don't know if it works on Joomla 5. We'll be working on a smart search plugin in a future release, but it's tricky.

Smart search doesn't search live results. It uses an indexer to pre-search and index the data and keywords. This gives a fast search, but it causes a massive privacy issue for profile data since the profile data can't be filtered based off per-user privacy and access controls resulting in searching fields the viewing users might not even have access to.

So we're having to try and tackle that issue and figure out how to best handle this. I've the smart search indexer plugin probably 50% done and will turn my attention it it once CB Activity 6.0.0 is out, but there's still going to be privacy issues I don't think we'll be able to resolve other than a big warning saying to only index public data.

The best way to search users though is to use a userlist. You can create a userlist within CB > List Management. This will respect access permissions and is a live search.

Again, that plugin is a Joomla legacy search plugin. It's not a CB plugin. It adds CB user searching to Joomla's legacy search component. The built in user searching is done entirely though userlists that you create in CB > List Management you do not need a plugin for that.