Search for information

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This article applies to the following Customer Insights roles: Viewer; Developer

Another way to find content in Customer Insights is to use the Global Search feature. You can access global search by clicking the Search link located in the upper right corner of the screen:

When you click Search, a dialog box appears pre-loaded with any Dashboards or Looks that you have marked as Favorites:

If you want to view one of those favorites, just click the appropriate link. Otherwise, start typing your search query. In response, Customer Insights begins displaying content that matches your search term (more on that in a minute). Customer Insights looks for title matches (but not description matches) in the following places:

• Folders
• Dashboards
• Looks
• Explores
• Additional locations within Customer Insights (e.g., Favorites and Recently Viewed)
• Account, History, and Sessions settings (grouped together in the search dialog under the label Looker)

“Hits” are then displayed in the dialog box:

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That’s a good question: seeing as how there’s no Close or Cancel button anywhere in the search dialog, what do you do if you decide not to search for stuff after all? Fortunately, that’s an easy question to answer: if you want to dismiss the search dialog, either press the Esc key on your keyboard, or simply click your mouse anywhere outside the dialog box.

Here’s another question: what do you need to type in order to find a match in Customer Insights? As a general rule, Customer Insights looks for a match between the characters you type and the characters in a Look, Dashboard, or Explore title. For example, suppose you’re looking for Dashboards or Looks that report information by gender. To do that, open the search dialog, and type the letter g:

As you can see, you initially get back a large number of hits, even though only a handful of those items begin with the letter g. And that’s an important point: Search looks for the target characters anywhere in the title, not just at the beginning of the title. As you can see, each of these items has the letter g somewhere in its title;

• Demographics
• Report - Demographics
• Report - Last Login and Deactivation

Type the next letter (an e), and you’ll see that the number of hits goes down:

That’s the way search typically works. That said, however, you might occasionally get back some seemingly-random results. For example, here’s what you see if you type the letters tiv:

Admittedly, that looks like a mistake: none of the returned items starts with the string value tiv in them. And that’s true. Remember, however, that Customer Insights doesn’t just look at the start of title when searching for items; instead, it looks for that string value anywhere in the title:

• Report - Last Login, Creation, and Deactivation
• Active Profiles (Last 365 Days Last Login Count)
• Deactivated Profiles (Last 365 Days Deactivated Count)

Just something to keep in mind.