Some of our knowledge articles open in strange view when searched by KB number

[Johan van den H]

If you search a knowledge article by entering its KB number in the search bar on our portal some of our articles are shown in the correct, user friendly, way while others are shown in a strange, rather oldfashioned way.

It might have to do something with the knowledge template that has been used to create these knowledge articles but we are unable to find what is going wrong.

Maybe the article URL has some info in it.
Correct displaying article:
esc?id=kb_article&table=kb_knowledge&sys_id=b2a2a704c3f6ce54ce1098a4e4013156&recordUrl=kb_view.do%3Fsysparm_article%3DKB0011449
Incorrect displaying article:

esc?
id=form&table=u_kb_template_service_catalog_article&sys_id=c84f67af83bab9146d06f665eeaad37c

Has anyone else seen this before and maybe some idea on how to fix it?

[Eoghan Sinnott]

OK, this is nothing to do with "old" templates so you do not have to remove or change any knowledge articles.
This is unfortunately the behavior of the "Exact Match" property as part of the AI Search results. If you search any record that is indexed for search, KB, INC etc.. and the results finds an exact match, it brings you directly to that record, rather than a page of results. So in this instance it is bringing the user to platform UI view of the Knowledge Article.
In my opinion it is a very poor customer experience, if people are searching in an Employee Centre portal, they should be kept in that view.
In order to prevent this from happening you need to turn off the "Enable Exact Match" feature, here is a link to a similar post.
If you do not want to turn off this feature, a workaround is adding another character to your search after you enter the KB number e.g search KB12345* .This will bring you to the normal search results page where the relevant KB should be top of the results. Again this isn't a great experience as it is hard to get everyone to follow, and can also somewhat skew any reporting you may do on keywords /search terms.

[Johan van den H]

Thank you @Eoghan Sinnott!
This seems to explain the behaviour we see and point to a possible solution 🙂

However, it leaves us with one question:
Why do some articles (created with one of the "bad" templates) seem to add something in the search that trigger the "Exact match" result which displays a "broken" article while the other articles (created with one of the "good" templates) also add that something in the search that triggers the "Exact match" result but displays a "correct" article?