How do you influence the results of the Recommended For You and Popular Topics widgets?

[Loudigi]

While it's amazing that these two features exist, they seemed to create a challenge at launch. Currently, both of these widgets are populating with items from the IT topic and completely ignoring items from other topics like HR. Understandably, the features are working as designed. These items and topics have the bulk of user activity so they bubble to the top. However, when you initially launch Employee Center, you may want a more fair or balanced display of items within these widgets so users understand the variety of items they have access to. Just like you can control the relevancy of the AI Search results, it would be great if you could manage the relevancy of Popular Items and Recommend For You. 
Does anyone have more documentation on how these actually work? And can they be manipulated? I found the sn_ex_sp_topic_metric table holds the metrics for Popular Items, but it cannot be edited. 

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

I can understand your question and concern, but adjusting those means you're skewing the results and they are in fact NOT relevant of popular items, etc.

When you first launch, all test items, etc. should have been removed so you start with 0 and thus those wouldn't have anything there as far as real weight.

If they do, now, then it's literally based on the popular items that are being ordered.

However, if you do wish the adjust them, back to your question, please refer to this documentation:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/rome-employee-service-management/page/product/employee-center/tas...

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Kass3m]

@Allen Andreas  the link you are providing to adjust popularity - doesnt show anything relevant. 

[VB14]

My concern is not how we tweaking the results., but how do we define the duration from which the popular items are retrieved.  Like we had recent-and-popular-items widget previously where one can set a property at the instance level to define the time span, it populates popular items in last 3 months or 6 months. do we have such feature in new popular Topic widget or is it planned ?

Popular Items used in

Time span over which users have requested the popular items. You select one of the following options: -- None --: Display popular catalog items with no time span specified. This is the default option. Last 3 Months: Display the most requested catalog items in the past three months. Last 6 Months: Display the most requested catalog items in the past six months. Last 12 Months: Display the most requested catalog items in the past year. Life time (Has performance implications): Display the most requested catalog items of all time. Selecting this option may decrease system performance.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-servicenow-platform/page/build/service-portal/concept/recent-and-popular-items-widget.html

[Loudigi]

So 2.5 months after Employee center launch the results are still the same. There needs to be a method of weighing the metric values. All the items and topics featured on the home page are IT related as they drive most of the volume of request. This means, that other topics and items from other areas, will never surface. The home page has become a static IT portal page. There's definitely room for improvement here.