How to configure the portal search to always sort the results by 'Relevance'?

[Marek Stepien]

We are upgrading our Utah instances to the Washington release, and our testers found out that the portal search returns inrelevant search results, especially when comparing them to google search results. We have over 40,000 public knowledge articles, and the portal knowledge search is pretty vital for our users. 

After some investigation we found out that Washington release stripped the search functionality. It looks, it is no longer possible to configure the search engine to ALWAYS sort the search results by relevance.

In contrast, all search engines I know (google, yahoo, bing, duckduckgo, yandex, etc.) have this as the default setting. Actually, they do not pressent any options to change this behavior, because to show the most relevant information on top of the search results is the essence of any search engine.

We know about the existance of the 'knowledge.search.sort.field' and 'knowledge.portal_search.sort.field' user preferences, but they pretty useless in regards to set the default behavior of the search engine.

Does anyone know how to configure the portal search engine in the Washington release to always sort the results by relevance?

This would be possible by rewriting the "Knowledge Result Sort" widget, but we would like to avoid this modification.

[Maik Skoddow]

Which search engine are you using? Zing or AI Search. If AI Search: The documentation says that sorting by relevance is the default behavior: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-platform-administration/page/administer/ai-search/co... 

[Marek Stepien]

Hi Maik, 

We are still using Zing search, but my understanding is that it does not matter. 

For the searches in the concole, there is a property "Knowledge search result order" under "Knowledge > Administration > Properties" where we set it.
There is no problem with it.

However for searches on the portals (Service Portals) is not longer possible to *always* get the search results sorted by relevance.
This functionality was in the previous releases, and is missing in Washington. Now Google gives us more reliable search results on article in Servicenow than the ServiceNow search deos.

Now the portal search require two step actions (1. search, 2. click the Relevance button), and we need to teach thousand and thousand of our users to do it.

Thanks,

Marek

[Marek Stepien]

We reported the issue to ServiceNow (via a HI tichet), and ServiceNow has been relactant to consider the issue as a defect. Hopefully they will. 
We asked them to produce an option (or preference) that we could set which will make the search results *always* shown in the relevance order. 

[Ron Kauffman]

Hi Marek

Did HI give you a workaround?  We have it in Xanadu, and unfortunately also took the sort widget off the results page so there's no way to even pick relevance.  Checking the logs it appears to flip between Published and View Count, but never picks Relevance.