Using ts_weight to impact search relevancy in Knowledge

[servicenowkevin]

Did you know that you can impact search relevancy by field weight in Knowledge? The Controlling Match Relevance by Field section of our documentation takes you through the basics of configuring your search relevancy at the field level. If you're interested in understanding search relevancy from an overall perspective, see Document Scoring.

The default field weighting is:

• kb_knowledge.number = 50
• kb_knowledge.short_description = 10
• kb_knowledge.meta = 10
• Every other field has a weight of 1 per occurrence and weighting increases exponentially for sequence matches.

At ServiceNow, we're using a weighting of:

• kb_knowledge.number = 50
• kb_knowledge.short_description = 15
• kb_knowledge.meta = 10
• Every other field has a weight of 1 per occurrence and weighting increases exponentially for sequence matches.

The difference for us is in the short description weighting (short description = article title). We find our result set improves with a greater focus on the short description. With strong titling standards, our titles are written to contain a quick overview of the issue, which should match the users search frequently.

We have been considering using a new field to allow certain articles to always appear at the top as "best bet" or "top suggestion" articles. For example, if a customer is searching on something related to LDAP issues, we may want this LDAP troubleshooting article to appear at the top of each result set because it provides the most comprehensive LDAP troubleshooting information in the knowledge base. To allow for this, we've considered using a custom SuperMeta field and providing a significant weight to that field. That would ensure that select content always appears at the top of results. We've played around with this in our personal test environments and it seems to work, but we haven't taken the idea any further. If we implemented this, we'd have to be very selective about what terms to use and how often the field would be used. If you were to over use that kind of feature, you'd ruin the overall search experience.

Have you changed the weighting for fields in Knowledge? What's working for you?

Let me know if you have search weight questions and I'll try to help you out.

[10382]

Today I have changed the weight on our Short Description to 15, but our knowledge manager is still finding a search result issue.   Or should I say, she feels our search results are not optimal (and we're missing articles).

I changed the short description weight to 15.   Our query search is AND then OR query.

When she creates an incident with a short description of "Unable to Connect to VPN - "AnyConnect was not abel to establish a connection" and does a knowledge search, she has more than 30 articles returned and is asked to refine her search.

However, one of the 30 articles display is "Unable to access VPN".

Instead of choosing that article, she refines her search as it tells her to do, and enters "Unable to connect to VPN".

When she does a search on that title, the article "Unable to access VPN" disappears from the list of relevant articles.

Am I missing something in how all the weighing and relevancy works?

Thanks for your help!

Julie Sampson

[kriss]

There must be other words in the original search string found in the "Unable to access VPN" article. I would add "connect_to_VPN" in the meta and "Unable to connect to VPN" in the symptoms section of the article to help improve results. Not sure if "unable" is a stop word... might check your list.

[Michael QCKM]

I'd love to know the outcome of this saga... we also see a bunch of inconsistencies, and would like to know how others have resolved them.

[sandraC]

Hello,

Excuse my question, but where Do I go in ServiceNow to configure that. I would that these parametrers:

• Short description : 100
• EC : 1 (désactivé)
• META : 30

Thanks for your help,

Best regards,

Sandra Chiaretto.

[Erich Zirnhelt]

Hi Sandra,

try this doc first. Let me know if you have more questions.

Good luck!