Service Portal AI Search and Synonyms

[Steven Parker]

So I have enabled AI Search for our Service Portal.  I selected the "Service Portal Default Search Applicaiton" as the Search Application as shown below:

That OOB Search Application has the Search Profile "Service Portal Default Search Profile" which has Synonyms in the related list - Default Synonym Dictionary.  

All of the applications and search profiles I am using are OOB

Well one of the OOB synonyms is "scam" and with the payload "phishing".  So anytime you search for either word catalog items or knowledge articles should be returned with those words.

Well we have a "Phishing Test" catalog item with meta of "phishing" as well and it is not returned when I search using our "Homepage Search" widget.  It doesn't appear the synonyms are working as I expect them to or at all.

Our homepage search widget is OOB with just the Title and Short Description updated and I added the Search Application under the AI Section:

Am I missing something about this setup process?  It seems pretty straight forward, but I am not seeing search results return as expected.

[Steven Parker]

I am going to look at these steps tomorrow.

I did see some changes once I republished stuff and logged out and back in.  I need to look at page route maps again as I know the search one is inactive and I will check the config on the widget.  I didn't think that search result config had to be set, but maybe it does.  What should it be if it does?

I will follow up tomorrow.  Thanks for your help so far.

[nataliya_b]

ok, i ran testing ai search set up as you did and I did not have any issues with synonyms

the only one possible cause i can think of - your phishing test catalog item has catalogs different from service catalog, also category shall not be empty

[nataliya_b]

Hi @Steven Parker , have you ever figured out what was the cause of your issue?

I am interested to know 🙂

thank you!

[Steven Parker]

I was able to get it working after logging all the way out, closing my browser, and logging back in.  I don't really like the way the AI search and search results look though compared to the normal typeahead search we had.  So we enabled synonyms and are still using the older search for now.

That's about normal for us though....anytime ServiceNow adds something or changes something everyone here thinks it looks worse/more complicated than the older look.  We prefer function over looks and if ServiceNow is introducing more clicks, more scrolling, more anything just to make something look more modern....not interested.

[michaelward]

Steven,

Firstly, don't get me started on the UI improvements such as the nav history, favoriting, 'All' navigation works, or the selector for the app scope and update sets.  While more or less useful, often a mind of its own with pinning or even the options showing and hiding randomly.  Drives me nuts.

But, on topic, and I know it's been a while, but did you ever examine the sys_search_event table for those synonyms and get and idea of their query result metrics there?   While I have not quite figured out its cache, the AI search results seem to cache 'somewhere' and I've seen where a result showed for a catalog item that had actually changed titles, causing confusion.