Button's click event fires, but can't trigger ajax call

Button's click event fires, but can't trigger ajax call

In a page of my asp.net mvc website, I load data into a jqGrid when the page loads, works perfectly without any problem.

Now I added a button for users to search employees by last name. The click event fires, because I can see my alert("Last name is " + lastName) popup. But the ajax call is ignored.

<input type="text" id="keyword" />
<input type="button" id="search" value="Search" />

$(document).ready(function () {

        $("#search").click(function () {
            var keyword = $.trim($("#keyword").val());
            //alert("Last name is " + keyword);
            $.ajax({
                url: '/Path/To/WebMethod/',
                dataType: 'json',
                type: 'POST',
                success: function (result) {
                       ...
                      ...
            });

As I said, the alert shows up just fine (I have commented it out for this post). But the ajax call that follows never gets triggered off.

I searched and also tried $("#button").on("click", function() { //blah blah });  It still does not work.