In Spring ’12, we bring you smart search, a new feature in global search that adds personalization and performance enhancements to make you more productive and successful. Search results are now intelligently ranked based on your Salesforce usage. We’ve also built in functionality that helps you organize the real estate on the search results page in a meaningful way. If this excites you, read on!

Smart search uses your Salesforce interaction data, including what you use and how often, to determine the items that are relevant to you. It uses this information to personalize your search scope to those items and related records, making the search more focused and faster. Smart search also reorders the results to align them with your areas of interest in Salesforce. So if you spend a lot of time working with Opportunities and Contacts, they’re likely to show up at the top of your search results, and faster than before. Internally, we call this “smart scoping” and “smart ordering”.

From the search results page, you can choose to drill further down into your results or expand the scope of your search using the options on the left side of the search results page. For example, clicking Contacts displays only the contacts returned in your search. On the Contacts results page, you can further refine your contacts search.

Similarly, to broaden your search scope across all types of records, click the Search All option. This query has the widest scope and may be slower. However, it is handy when you’re searching for newly added items or when you aren’t sure about the type or location of the information you’re looking for. Note that your actions on the search results page will be used to update your smart search settings and influence result ordering in real time.

Another cool feature in this release is pinning. The top of the search results page is prime real estate, and going forward, you get to choose what you see there. So if smart search ordering puts Opportunities at the top of the results based on your usage, but you’d always like to see Accounts info up top in your searches, you can pin Accounts to the top of the page. Simply hover over the type of record and click the pin symbol that appears. 

You can pin more than one item to the top, and your pinned sequence will be maintained in all your future searches until you change the order.

A few pointers to make the most of smart search functionality:

• If you have Chatter enabled, smart search is enabled by default in the Spring ‘12 release.
• Until we have collected enough usage data about you to define a smart scope, Salesforce will continue to search all items by default and smart search features may not be available right away. We want to make sure we get it right the first time, so we’ll wait until we’ve got all the data required to make a good recommendation.
• Any search scope selections you defined before the Spring ‘12 release will be factored into your search scope.
• New entities (including custom types of records) will not show up until you have interacted with them. You can find them using Search All.
• You can also search Chatter feeds.  Here's how! 

Check out smart search in action in this video that our team put together: 

Watch this space for updates on more new functionality!