Is it true that noindexing content will remove it from our site search?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Lindsey Siegele: I have a noindex question: My website uses Google's site search as its primary on-site search function. In an effort to improve the quality of the website's content and recover from what we think might be a Panda penalty, we've pinpointed several pieces of content that we'd like to noindex-follow. We did some research, and we think we've discovered that doing this would remove that content from our site search index, as well. So two questions, really: 1) Is it true that noindexing content will remove it from our site search, and 2) Is there any kind of workaround for this? It would be great if our content could still be found by our website's visitors. Thanks in advance!
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  Peter Lunn: Hi Lindsay,
  
  (1) if a page is no longer indexed in Google's index then the same will be true of when using their site search. However, just adding an internal nofollow on an internal link won't necessarily remove that page from Google's index. It could be the page you are nofollow-ing is linked to on an external site and so Google will possibly index it from there. The only safe strategy is to remove pages you think may be causing an issue. Has Google given you warnings as such through your Google Webmaster Tools?
  
  (2) A nofollow only says to the search engine don't follow that link, but the link is still active for someone to click. For example, the majority of links in blog comments are tagged as nofollow, but it is still possible to click those links and 'follow' them as a user.
  
  Peter
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  Joseph Paulino: +Lindsey Siegele ;Have you tried disallowing them content in your robots.txt instead and then index-follow in the meta robots tag?
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  Tony McCreath: Interesting question. I wonder if the site search uses a different robot and in that case you could noindex on a user agent basis.