JQuery Datatable filter css

I have a really dumb question if you don't mind me to ask :(

the thing is that I would like to customise the filter in my datatable to the search field similar to stackoverflow's but i've been struggl开发者_JS百科ing so much recently so not sure if i can do it.

my datatable looks like the one from the example in the link below: link text

Thanks for the help!

eventually how i did it was: i disabled the visibility of the datatable filter, and created a search box for the table and applied css to it. could not find a way to customise the actual searchbox of the datatable, had to do it in a short time, so made it in an ugly way :)