Search key pressed twice searches previous text

Would be nice if pressing incremental search key (e.g. ctrl+s) a 2nd time defaulted to the previous search.  If this can be accomplished with contexts, that would be good enough, but I'm not seeing it.

Emacs has a nice feature to make it quick to perform the same incremental search multiple times, which I do in cases where I search, make some edits, then move to the next instance.

Like ST, the first press displays the search panel with no text.  However, pressing again before inserting text automatically chooses the previous from history.  Since there is nothing to search for, which is normally what the 2nd press would do, there is nothing else useful the key could do, so this seems like a reasonable default.

Am I missing some easy keystrokes to get to search history?  Particularly without using arrow keys?