Today we roll out a myriad of changes to supercharge our Search capabilities. When we began looking at product usage statistics, it became quite clear rather quickly how little our users were aware of the search capability – either they didn't know about it, or it didn't pack enough features to be useful, so we set out to improve the functionality. Today, you'll notice the search bar is now ubiquitous, i.e. it displays on every single screen in the portal; but, that's not all of it – the updated Search capabilities pack a whole lot more punch than they used to, read on to discover!

Always-on: search anywhere

Let's start with the most obvious changes: 

1. The Universal Search bar is now present on every screen, at the same central top location, and is not hidden behind a keyboard shortcut anymore: this change is part of a long series of future changes that will make Universal Search a much more central piece of UX in Kentik Portal, so we started by giving it its rightful place.
2. For the Keyboard users, we have changed the shortcut to summon it with cmd + / : this is more aligned to SaaS industry standards. Summoning Search without a search term will bring up a much more useful empty state, but don't worry if you're not a keyboard-type user: clicking into it without entering any search term will also bring up the same improved empty state.

Favorite everything!

While working on a more useful empty state for this search overlay, we extended the ability to favorite screens. Starting today, you can favorite almost every screen in the product by clicking on the star icon next to the screen title. This will come in handy with the new empty state this overhauled Search feature comes with, read on.

For instance, you can favorite:

• Any dynamic quick view page, for instance a specific ASN that you've been working on, like Kentik's AS6169 – this basically works for any page of the form https://portal.kentik.com/v4/core/quick-views// this includes Sites, IPs, etc. ...

• Any Top Talkers page from Network Explorer, such as this top IPs page – essentially any screen with a base URL of https://portal.kentik.com/v4/core/quick-views/
  
  
• Any settings screen you often go back to, for instance this Interface Classification settings screen
  
  
• Even better, you can now favorite a specific Capacity Plan you're currently tracking, or a specific Connectivity Costs Provider you want to keep your eye on!

But what's the use of being able to Favorite any screen if these favorites aren't put to good use you rightfully ask? Well. Read on.

An (much) improved empty state

Now that you can favorite any screen, we brought this into the new Universal Search empty state so you can now get quick access to your favorites by just hitting the search keyboard shortcut, or just click into it. A greatly improved search results page will show as an overlay with 3 tabs, two of them being naturally populated with useful empty states: Favorites, Recents, and Search Results.

Until you start typing in the search input field, your favorites will be displayed. If you don't have any, then your Recent Dashboards and Saved Views tab will be active. As soon as you start typing in the search input, the active tab will switch to Search Results.

Amongst other features you'll notice:

• you are able to favorite or un-favorite any item directly from the search results overlay!
• you can entirely navigate the search overlay with a keyboard: 
  • ← and → let you switch between Favorites, Recents, Search Results
  • ↑ and ↓ let you select records in the main search result
  • [Enter] will take you to the selected screen
• Hitting [Esc] clears the search bar if you have text in it, and discard the search overlay when the search input is empty
• The Recents tab now contains a time and category ordered list of the recently viewed Dashboards and Saved views, and you will notice that we now centrally persist your Recently Viewed items.

Better Structured search results

As you type text in the Search input, you'll notice the Search Results tab populating, and we've dramatically improved its appearance and usability, see for yourself – it is now much easier to locate  the right search result using this updated UX.

Moving forward

With this update, we've laid the ground work for powerful, future capabilities for Search. We've made it central and are now ready to tackle the next iterations. At current, we're thinking, in no particular order:

• What if users could search for any screen to navigate towards ? This is about making Search a substitute to click-based navigation – and the most common example out there would be Windows' Search or MacOS' Spotlight.
• Conversational AI everywhere? What if you could directly ask any question on your infrastructure in the Search bar, with a mode that turns it into a Network Copilot prompt?
• Command Bar for Action type commands: with productivity Apps such as Alfred, or Launchbar - we've started to ask ourselves, what if a user wanted to create a new synthetic test directly from the search bar? or add a new device directly from the search bar?

If you have more ideas that you'd like to share with us as to how you foresee the future of our search capabilities, please do let us know!