Index Groups in Service Portal

[John from Space]

Hello,

The current configuration of our Service Portal is set up to use multiple search sources, one for KB articles, and one for catalog items. This makes getting good search results difficult because the results are ranked first by search source, and then by relevancy. In other words, every catalog item result is returned before any KB results are returned. Ideally, we would like to interlace the results of these search sources so that the most relevant results of any type rise to the top.

Please correct me if I am wrong about this, but this is what I understand Text Index Groups to be for. I have attempted to set up an index group in our development instance which includes both the catalog item and the KB tables. I have followed all of the instructions in the documentation for this. I have also added the Text Index Group I created to the appropriate field in our Service Portal configuration, and added "123TEXTINDEXGROUP321" to both search sources.

This has not changed the search results in any way. What else do I need to do to get our Service Portal search results to use the Text Index Group I've configured?

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That is my main question, but I wanted to provide some additional info about some issues that I ran into while following the instructions linked above for setting up the Text Index Group Configuration.

The main issue I had was with how Text Index Group Configurations are linked to specific tables. Sure, when you change Applies to to Index group the UI Policy hides the Table field. I don't understand why it does that, because it very much continues to use the table field, like so:

1. The record is secretly labeled using the (now hidden) table field.
   • My first attempt at creating a configuration was now labeled ".NET Application" in the references to it because this is the table that was selected by default when creating a new record, even though that default was hidden as soon as I selected Index group.
2. The UI Action for Generate Text Index, if you drill into it, uses the table field whether or not you have selected Index group in Applies to. 
3. You can't create a second configuration for a table that already has a configuration. You also can't create a configuration with the table field blank. 

So then, what should be in the table field for a configuration that is supposed to apply to an index group?

I tried tooling around with the UI Policies and the like to create a record with no table value and only an Index Group, but because of number 2 above, that probably isn't working. Who knows if the blackbox script include function tsIndexCreatorPopup can take as an argument an index group sys_id or name, it certainly doesn't appear to be set up to do that.

Anyways, I don't even know if the TIG Configuration that I'm struggling with even matters. I would be perfectly happy using the OoB portal_index_group, as we are only trying to combine KB and cat item results anyways. We don't need any special configurations, just for the correct index to be running to interlace our results.

Thank you in advance for any help!

-John

[Ned Chamberlain]

Following!  Having KB articles return first vs catalog items would be nice.  Also to manage the weight of catalogs for results.  I know the search results in EC for Faceted Search Widget specifically orders the catalog results first.  It looks like this would require a customization to change that for this widget.