ESC Search Issue – KB Article Searchable by KB Number but Not by Short Description or Meta Keywords

[Sirri]

Hi Team,

I am facing an issue with Knowledge Article search in Employee Service Center (ESC) for a user whose language is set to Chinese.

Scenario:

• The user belongs to China and their preferred language is Chinese.
• When I impersonate the user, the ESC interface automatically switches to Chinese.
• The user is able to find the Knowledge Article when searching by the KB Number (for example, KB0012345).
• However, when searching using the article's Short Description or keywords defined in the article's Meta tags/Meta description, the article does not appear in the search results.

Questions:

1. What could cause a Knowledge Article to be searchable by KB Number but not by Short Description or Meta Keywords in ESC?
2. Are there any language-specific indexing or search configuration considerations for Chinese content?
3. What troubleshooting steps should be performed to identify the root cause?
4. Should we verify search source configurations, AI Search settings, Zing indexing, translated article records, or language-specific indexing behavior?

Troubleshooting performed so far:

• Verified that the user has access to the Knowledge Article.
• Confirmed that the article is retrievable by KB Number.
• Confirmed that the user's language is automatically set to Chinese during impersonation.
• Issue occurs when searching using Short Description and Meta Keywords.

Has anyone encountered a similar issue or can suggest additional troubleshooting steps?

Thank you.

[Vikram Reddy]

Hello @Sirri,

My money's on Zing versus AI Search, not a permissions or language-filter problem. KB number lookup is an exact identifier match, so it works no matter what's behind it, but matching on short description and meta keywords depends on tokenization, and legacy Zing has no real tokenization support for Chinese: without spaces between words, it can't reliably find the word boundaries in the text, so free-text matches quietly fail. AI Search, on the other hand, does support tokenization and lemmatization for Traditional and Simplified Chinese, so if your Employee Center Knowledge search source is still pointed at Zing rather than AI Search, that alone explains number search working and content search coming up empty for this user. Worth confirming which engine is actually configured for that search source first. While you're in there, also check the meta field on the Indexed Source for kb_knowledge under Field Settings and Mapping, if a not_searchable attribute got set on it, meta keywords stop matching regardless of language, and that one bites English articles just as often.

Thank you,
Vikram Karety
Octigo Solutions INC