Pull articles from the Network and Side Wide Search

Hello everybody! I have 2 outstanding queries with me.

1) How to pull articles (or recent articles) from the network of blogs? My theme is capable of pulling out the recent articles from the main site blog only. It appears that my users’ blogs are not featured in any of the pages! I would like to showcase the user blog’s articles in same way. We do have /blogs/ page which displays the list of activated blogs under the network. But I also look forward to recent articles from all the blogs (except main site blog) to be featured using any widget/plugin.
Could I achieve my wish using Recent Site Wide Posts widget? Or pls let me know the alternate ways.

2) We have “Search” tool in our conventional blogs. In multi-site, I would like to see this “Search” to cover all the blogs. If I give a keyword to search, it should be matched against all the articles in all the blogs(including main site blog). Unfortunately, my current theme doesn’t have “Search” to search in main site blog or anything. Do we have any plugins to search in the entire network?

I will look forward to the replies.
Thanks in advance.