Universal search
A search bar runs across the top of every signed-in page. It accepts whatever you can name — a UARN, a billing reference, a postcode, an address phrase, or a ratepayer name — and routes you to the right place. The bar is a convenience; the heavy lifting lives in Search.
The search bar
Type what you have. As you type, a dropdown opens directly below the input. The dropdown has a locked vertical order. At the top, your lens — see Search lens — sits in a tinted band, pre-seeded with the lens you last used; change it before you submit if you want a different curation for this question. Below the lens, the dropdown shows your saved items that match — bookmarks, portfolios, prospecting runs, and lenses — each row labelled with a coloured chip so you can tell what each is at a glance. Below that, the dropdown shows top matches from the database, labelled by what you typed: Identifier lookup for UARNs and billing references; Postcode for postcodes; Address phrase for free-text that looks like an address; Top matches — ratepayer for ratepayer names. The label tells you what the bar understood. Type two or more letters of an authority's name and a Sources section, between your saved items and the database matches, offers up to three authorities, each with the latest quarter we collected and the day we collected it; opening one takes you to its history.
Some accounts cannot be tied to a property on the rating list, and those are offered too, marked unmatched. Opening one takes you to its own page rather than a property page, so the mark tells you where you are going before you click. Properties come first in the list; an account and the property of the same name both show, because they are different things.
You have three routes out. Click a saved-item row to open that item's detail page direct. Click a single database match — a known UARN, an exact ratepayer — to open that thing direct, with no Search results page in between. Click Run full search for "what you typed" at the foot, or press Enter, to open Search results with the term as a free-text query and your lens applied.
The bar is not a query language. For a question that needs filtering, sorting, or composition — Tesco hereditaments in Harlow above a rateable value — submit the term and use the result frame's filters. Most ten-second look-ups end at the dropdown; everything richer happens inside Search.
Keyboard shortcuts
⌘K on a Mac, or Ctrl-K on Windows, focuses the bar from anywhere you are in the Explorer; / is an alternative shortcut. Use arrow keys to walk the matches in the dropdown — the arrows skip the lens picker, so your typing-to-Enter flow stays fast. Your cursor never leaves the input, so you can keep typing at any point; the arrows move a highlight, not the cursor. Enter takes the highlighted row, the same as clicking it. Enter with nothing highlighted opens Search results. Escape closes the dropdown but leaves your typed term in the input.
When the dropdown opens with exactly one match — a UARN you pasted, a saved item that matches what you typed precisely — that row is highlighted from the start. Paste a UARN, press Enter, and you land on the hereditament directly.