The videos you see using the scanner to facilitate searches do work.  For a while, I used Excel to merge my SKUs to the end of the item name so I could search for SKUs (before importing the catelog to Square).  You touch the seach bar, scan the bar code, and the item will show up in the search results.  You need to do this for each item, which I didn't like, so bought a wired scanner.  With the wired scanner, I can scan mulitple bar crodes (or one more than once) and each item is added to the sale.