I have a panel/page that has a view (it's a view page) that some fields and filters that allows user for search for content of a certain content type. The problem is that views by default displays all of the content (even if the user hasn't performed a search yet).
So how do I setup the view so that it doesn't display results by default? I.e. only display results when user has performed a search.
For doing that you should set the default value of the exposed filters in some combination that doesn't return anything, in this way when the user visits the page they will not see any result and those filters will have the values that you choose by default.
The other alternative is extracting the exposed filter form from code and placing that in a block, if you want to do this take a look to this post http://www.angrydonuts.com/displaying_views_exposed_filters