How to access to the user info on the search page?

Question

When I was trying to resolve this question: How to display the user picture on the search page? I found that in the THEME_preprocess_search_result function I can't access to the user information (I use the user search functionality) the only information about the searched users that I can use is the follow:

function THEME_preprocess_search_result(&$variables) {
    dpm($variables);
}

I can use the username and the email, I can extract from $variables['result']['title'] the username, but I think that the best way is access directly to the uid of the searched user. The problem is that I don't know how access to this information.

So, there is another way to obtain the uid of a searched user?

EDIT: I need the info of the system users (drupal users). User is not a content type.

Answer 1

Did you try implementing hook_preprocess_search_results (notice the plural search results)?

I haven't tested recently and I'm on a mobile right now. But I'm pretty sure that hook somehow had node objects (should be user objects in your case). Collect the UIDs, run a user_load_multiple and then add the user objects to each result for profit in hook_preprocess_search_results.

Update

I'm no longer on my mobile, so I could actually test this. It turns out that the user module does not feed the results set with the user account. I don't think Drupal 7 will receive these features anymore, so you'd have to patch the core user.module to achieve that.

Here is a patch if you are interested in going down that path: https://gist.github.com/Ayesh/b1892942b053dc746fb5