As of Dec 2020, pip search will not work (more).
The current feasible solution is to search online, on: https://pypi.org/ (reference also provided by previous comments).
If anyone hitting the following error:
xmlrpc.client.Fault: <Fault -32500: "RuntimeError: PyPI's XMLRPC API has been temporarily
disabled due to unmanageable load and will be deprecated in the near future.
See https://status.python.org/ for more information.">
as stated in #5216:
As an update: XMLRPC search does still remain disabled.
because:
As noted in #5216 (comment), a group of servers are hitting the pip search entry point, to an extent that PyPI cannot sustain that load with the current architecture of how pip search works.
Update: As a CLI alternative to pip, that uses PyPI registry, one can use poetry:
$ poetry search <package>