Enhancement: Ability to Search and Retrieve Full User History Across All Date Periods

[ronak-innocraft]

Currently, in Matomo, user visit history is restricted to the selected date period. However, there are many use cases where it would be beneficial to search for a specific user and retrieve their entire history of interactions with a site, regardless of the selected date range.

Problem Statement:
When tracking user activity, we often need to look up a specific user’s full interaction history over time. However, Matomo currently requires us to adjust the date range manually, which makes it difficult to get a comprehensive view of a user’s engagement.

For example, if a user visits a site today and then returns in six months, there is no straightforward way to search for that user and retrieve all their previous interactions without knowing the exact date ranges. This becomes a challenge for customer support, security audits, and behavioral analysis.

Proposed Enhancement:
Introduce a "User Search" feature that allows searching for any user by User ID (or other identifiers), regardless of the selected date range.
Display a full historical log of visits and interactions associated with that user across all time.
Provide filtering options to refine results by date, device, location, or other attributes.
Ensure the feature works efficiently even with large datasets.

Benefits:
Better User Tracking – Easily trace a user’s journey across multiple visits.
Improved Customer Support – Quickly resolve issues by reviewing past interactions of a user.
Enhanced Behavioral Analysis – Understand long-term engagement trends without needing to guess date ranges.
Security & Compliance – Investigate suspicious behavior over extended periods.

Potential Implementation Approaches:
Extend the existing Visitor Log or User ID reports to support global user searches.
Implement a search API or a dedicated UI section where admins can input a User ID and retrieve full history.

Additional Context:
This feature would be especially useful for businesses that rely on user history for personalization, fraud detection, and customer engagement analytics.

Would love to hear thoughts from the community and maintainers on the feasibility of this feature!