Meta Format

[Dan Rosenstein]

Is there a document that states best practice for typing meta? This would include when to use commas, underscores for phrases, etc. Basically, how to do meta for a knowledge article out of the box best practices. 

[Henrietta T]

@OPBarber Great info! Thank you!! Is there a max. character cut off in the Meta field? Where do you check/find actual key search terms being used by end users? I've been in build content mode and have not had a chance to get into all the available reporting to optimize content. Do you and your team solely use what is provide in SNOW? Or do you have it integrated with Google Analytics or other tools?

[OwenB]

There is no Maximum as far as I have found.  We are using the SNOW Search Log and other reports we have created based on what users are searching in our Portal KB which we display on a Dashboard.

[Barry_W]

Not suggesting your testing is wrong, but this thread seems to suggest underscores offer no benefit in terms of search relevancy. 

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=59cf0f65dbdcdbc01dcaf3231f96...

My own testing also suggests underscores offer no benefit when using search relevancy scores as a gauge.

I've trawled several forums and documents on this subject and as far as I can tell the answer is use commas to separate single words or phrases.

Although I cant say I'm 100% on that!

[OwenB]

underscores are just tying your words together as phrases.  Much as when you search using the Speech marks it knows to search for those words in that order, we find that tagging words together in Meta using the underscores negates the need to search with the "'s.  As although you find nothing in the settings to show underscores improve the score it does signal to zing to treat the phrase as a word and therefore give you better results.  So if we have a Knowledge Management Process article and tagged this in the Meta as Knowledge_Management_Process with a comma after the search engine effectively see's that as match when Knowledge Management Process is searched and we find its always in the top 2 or 3 of results. It works a treat for us and our close to OTB setup but of course unaware what customisations have been made in your instances.

[Barry_W]

Thanks for the reply OPBarber - Loving this discussion!

This is the testing I alluded to above. I am more than happy to be proven wrong if someone can give me a definitive answer, as I'm still not convinced using underscores in the meta field add any extra weight to search phrases...unless the searcher also uses them.

I created two identical articles as follows. No content other than a short description and some matching phrases in the meta field. Note however, in Meta test 1 the first phrase is linked by underscores.

I then searched for "search for this 12345", once using "" and once without.

I get the following results (regardless of the use of ""). Note the relevancy score is the same for both articles. 

Not the most sophisticated of tests I know, but this seems to suggest that zing treats each comma separated phrase in the same way, regardless of having underscores linking the words.

However....if I use underscores in my search, as per the image below, you'll note zing appears to recognise this, and adjudge the article with the underscores to be of more relevance: