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I am trying to figure out the best way to customize global search. There is a need for a rep to be able to quickly search for an account. Right now, with Global search enabled, the rep must type the account name into the Global Search box at the top of Salesforce. This will search your recent items as you type. My first question is, is it possible for this global search to search all items as you type rather than just your recent items? For instance, if you have 6 accounts that start with phrase "Martin Luther", as the user types "Martin Luther" is it possible for the populated items to display all results rather than just recently viewed accounts?

My second question related to the possibility of doing an advanced search directly from the Global Search. For instance, Global Search searches all objects by default. Is it possible to provide some sort of criteria to customize this search, such as searching the term "AccountName=Martin Luther" would only return accounts named Martin Luther rather than every object? Preferably we would be able to customize that even more to something like "AccountName=Martin Luther,BillingState=PA".

Essentially, we feel there are too many clicks involved with searching for an account. We want the rep to be able to just type an account name and have the accounts related to that search term to show up. As it stands right now, if you are searching for the Account "Foo" from the state of California, you must:

  1. Type the term "Foo" into the Global Search and hit Enter
  2. Click "Show Filters" under the Accounts list
  3. Type "Foo" again into the AccountName and type "California" into the Billing State/Province filter (assuming you already have both of those fields set up as filters)
  4. Click "Apply Filters"

We want to shorten this process by any means possible, so if anyone has any ideas, please feel free to share them.

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    Are you willing to give up on GS and build your own search page (blog.jeffdouglas.com/2010/07/13/… is a prety badass example) & include a link/form leading to it as a home page or sidebar component?
    – eyescream
    Jan 18, 2013 at 15:53
  • We could definitely build our own search page. That is an option. Ideally though it would be better if we could do this out of the gate, but I have a feeling this may not be possible. Thank you for the example and the link to the blog article. That is exactly the type of thing I was looking for.
    – Jesse Altman
    Jan 18, 2013 at 16:14
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    @eyescream is correct. You won't get this functionality out of native global search but you can definitely roll your own version of this with SOSL/SOQL behind the scenes.
    – Greg Grinberg
    Jan 18, 2013 at 19:19

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Based on what @eyescream and @grigriforce has suggested and additional research I have done, it seems like this isn't possible out of any base functionality. The only way this is possible is through custom functionality written in Visualforce/Apex.

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