Horizontal scroll on overflow of table

I think your overflow should be on the outer container. You can also explicitly set a min width for the columns. Like this:

.search-table-outter { overflow-x: scroll; }
th, td { min-width: 200px; }

Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/5WsEt/

Unless I grossly misunderstood your question, move overflow-x:scroll from .search-table to .search-table-outter.

http://jsfiddle.net/ZXnqM/4/

.search-table-outter {border:2px solid red; overflow-x:scroll;}
.search-table{table-layout: fixed; margin:40px auto 0px auto;   }

As far as I know you can't give scrollbars to tables themselves.

A solution that nobody mentioned is use white-space: nowrap for the table and add overflow-x to the wrapper.

(http://jsfiddle.net/xc7jLuyx/11/)

CSS

.wrapper { overflow-x: auto; }
.wrapper table { white-space: nowrap; }

HTML

<div class="wrapper">
    <table></table>
</div>

This is an ideal scenario if you don't want rows with multiple lines.
To add break lines you need to use <br/>.

The solution for those who cannot or do not want to wrap the table in a div (e.g. if the HTML is generated from Markdown) but still want to have scrollbars:

table {
  display: block;
  max-width: -moz-fit-content;
  max-width: fit-content;
  margin: 0 auto;
  overflow-x: auto;
  white-space: nowrap;
}

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>Especially on mobile, a table can easily become wider than the viewport.</td>
    <td>Using the right CSS, you can get scrollbars on the table without wrapping it.</td>
  </tr>
</table>

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>A centered table.</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Explanation: display: block; makes it possible to have scrollbars. By default (and unlike tables), blocks span the full width of the parent element. This can be prevented with max-width: fit-content;, which allows you to still horizontally center tables with less content using margin: 0 auto;. white-space: nowrap; is optional (but useful for this demonstration).