How to dismiss keyboard in Android SearchView?

I was trying to do something similar. I needed to launch the SearchActivity from another Activity and have the search term appear on the opened search field when it loaded. I tried all the approaches above but finally (similar to Ridcully’s answer above) I set a variable to SearchView in onCreateOptionsMenu() and then in onQueryTextSubmit() called clearFocus() on the SearchView when the user submitted a new search:

private SearchView searchView;

@Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
    getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.search_menu, menu);
    searchView = (SearchView) menu.findItem(R.id.menu_search)
            .getActionView(); // set the reference to the searchView
    searchView.setOnQueryTextListener(this); 
    searchMenuItem = (MenuItem) menu.findItem(R.id.menu_search); 
    searchMenuItem.expandActionView(); // expand the search action item automatically
    searchView.setQuery("<put your search term here>", false); // fill in the search term by default
    searchView.clearFocus(); // close the keyboard on load
    return true;
}

@Override
public boolean onQueryTextSubmit(String query) {
    performNewSearch(query);
    searchView.clearFocus();
    return true;
}