Searching within an article

[NatalieAppleton]

I have an article that needs to be published which includes a very long list of items. Is there anyway that a viewer of the article can search within the actual article body? 

[mbernste]

The easiest way is for them to use the search in page function of their preferred web browser.

[SatyakiBose]

Hello @NatalieAppleton 

When you say very long list of items do you mean the text or the content of the article ?

You can index the kb_knowledge table and also include the field where the body is added.

The Article body field is called 'text'

You need to perform the steps:

1. Navigate to https://xxxx.service-now.com/sys_dictionary_list.do?sysparm_query=name%3Dkb_knowledge&sysparm_view=a...
2. Search for column name - text
3. Set the text index value to true.

This way users can search from the article body text.

But then the drawback here is that this indexing will take a long time depending on your table size, as it has to go through the article body of each knowledge article and then index it.

it is not a recommended practice.

Instead knowledge management provides us with a field called - Meta.

You can include specific keywords in the meta field which you feel would be the most commonly used phrase to search the KB article.

You can go through the article here - Using meta tags in Knowledge Base articles to improve SEO and reduce incidents

Hope I was able to answer your question.

If this helped, please mark the answer as solution.

[Gregg Grose]

Would using the browser's search tool be suitable? Either press Ctrl + F or F3, enter your search criteria and then  either press Ctrl + G or again press F3 to cycle through the matches.

[Lauren Methena]

I second this. I have a knowledge block that I can insert to certain articles that tells people how to use CTRL+F to search for keywords in long PDF documents/attachments and within articles.

Option B if you want to seem more service oriented is to ORGANIZE the items into groups > Create a table of contents > use anchor tags to jump people down to a group of items or terms so that they have less to look through.

But I'd try CTRL+F first, as that's the simplest solution, and only go to something else if that doesn't fit your users' needs.

Good luck! Please let us know what you end up doing, and mark "helpful" if you find any of this advice helpful. 🙂