How should I search for Jungles and Jungle Temples in Minecraft?

One way I've used before is to start a huge Jungle forest fire. This burns all the trees down leaving the temples visable from far away.

No, there is not a surefire way of finding a temple, but you can look on the internet for seeds where there is a jungle temple nearby spawn.

I looked on the internet myself and found that this seed spawns you in a world with a jungle temple in it you just have to teleport yourself to x: -168 z: 53, the seed is 2784386679562896341.

Jungles in Minecraft were made much rarer in the 1.7 update, so if you are using that they're going to be much harder to find. However, biomes will now place themselves next to other biomes of the same climate, and because Jungles are warm, you should look near Deserts, Mesas, and Savanas. Temples inside these jungles are difficult to find, and not all jungles have them. It can help to burn down some of the trees, since because the temple is made of stone, it will be safe from burning. Aside from using mods or seeds, thats really the best you can do.

World structure is not something that you can find out with 100% security without a tool. There is a mathematical function at work that uses the seed to calculate how the world will look like.

In order to find out what biome will be in a certain location with a 100% security, you will have to do the same calculation as the world generator in minecraft is doing. The issue there is, that you will not be able to say "give me the nearest jungle". You will have to generate the world around you and then look if there is a jungle. But either way, you will need to use an external tool to do this calculation, since it is quite complicated and since minecraft does not have any built-in tool that could help you there.

What you need in the end is something that is either using the seed and the generation engine of your current minecraft version and try to preview a certain area (like AMIDST) or a tool that looks at already generated maps such as a mapping tool.

To strictly answer your question, as @user1337 stated in the comments, without using a third party application, there is no 100% accurate way to locate a jungle temple.

The only option you have is to explore and find one by chance. There are things you can do to slightly increase your chances of finding one.

• Craft yourself a number of flint and steel to burn down the jungle foliage. - This takes some time and effort, and it's very easy to set yourself on fire. The time you end up waiting for the flames to die down, could easily make this slower than just roaming between the trees.
• Pillar up in the world to give yourself an aerial view - This only tends to work at close range, as jungle temples will be hidden by the trees. You'll have a better chance if you set your render distance to high, and pillar up as far as you can, but even then, they can be difficult to spot.

In more recent versions you can use the locate command. You need commands enabled. Typing this in chat:

/locate jungle_pyramid

should print something like this:

The nearest jungle temple is at [623, 62, -1145] (522 blocks away)

The coordinates will also be bright green. Clicking them will insert a tp command in chat that brings you straight to the location.