Global search is not returning results and only works with exact match

[ChristofferM]

Hello Community,  

Before submitting a ticket to ServiceNow via HI, I wanted to ask here. One of our clients is experiencing a problem in their production instance. The global search field doesn't produce any results unless there's an exact task number match.

So I've noticed a few things.

- In the production instance, the "Recently searched" section doesn't appear when clicking the global search field, whereas it's visible in the test instance.

- The production instance displays the message, "Search is now even smarter. Find knowledge, records, people and more. Try it now!" This isn't shown in the test instance.

- Searching for a non-existent item in the test instance provides feedback: "0 results for 'searched text'" and "No results for 'searched text'. Try searching for something less specific or search within your lists."

- However, in production, the only feedback is: "No results found. Try updating your search." Plus, there's an "All" tab.

I've compared everywhere I can think of and read the documentation up and down, but I'm at a loss. I'm not sure where to look anymore. AI Search has been requested and enabled in some places, but the test should be a mirror of the production instance. 

Has anyone encountered this or resolved a similar issue?

[Ben Cuddington]

I just want to add, that I also was having this issue regardless of the system property mentioned here as it didn't even exist "glide.ui.polaris.ais_ready", so I even attempted to create the property & set it accordingly; but that didn't work.   What DID work, was updating the roles here (since my scenario was for a non-ITIL role - users without it but have "read" access):   https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-platform-administration/page/administer/search-admin...  

I had to go to the m2m_search_context_config_search_source table & open up each "Application Search Source" where:  Search context config = "Now Experience Search Configuration".    (Depending on your instance/setup, I had to open each one & then add the custom role to each).   

After that, I was able to impersonate the user(s) in question & finally was able to start seeing results instead of "No results..."