AI Search release notes
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Summary of AI Search Release Notes
The ServiceNow® AI Search application has been enhanced in the Yokohama release to provide a more intuitive, consumer-grade search experience. Key updates focus on improving search precision, contextual relevance, and user insights.
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Key Features
- Hybrid Search: Combines keyword-based and semantic understanding for improved accuracy and fewer zero-result searches, available for Now Assist in AI Search users.
- Improved User Experience: Updated search portals, global search, and workspace search for a more streamlined experience, featuring source facet buckets and new navigation elements.
- Indexing Enhancements: Control index size and performance with guardrails, customize semantic indexing settings, and boost relevancy based on a synonym dictionary.
- Search Suggestions: Enhanced insights into search behavior with new admin tools and access to Search Suggestions tables for search administrators.
- Knowledge Block Indexing: Now includes knowledge block content in search results to enhance recall, with options to disable this feature.
- Deprecations: The External Content Q&A Genius Results feature is being prepared for future deprecation.
Key Outcomes
By upgrading to Yokohama, customers can expect:
- Enhanced search results that are more relevant and contextually accurate.
- Improved user engagement through a refined search interface.
- Greater control over search indexing and result customization.
- Access to valuable insights regarding user search behavior to optimize search applications.
Ensure to reindex knowledge articles to make their content searchable after the upgrade.
The ServiceNow® AI Search application provides a consumer-grade search experience for ServiceNow AI Platform® users. AI Search was enhanced and updated in the Yokohama release.
AI Search highlights for the Yokohama release
Yokohama Patch 11
- Improve search precision and contextual relevance with hybrid search, available for customers with Now Assist in AI Search installed.
- Gain insights into search behavior with a refreshed and updated Search Preview UI.
Yokohama Patch 6
- Search more intuitively with an updated, consumer-grade user experience in search portals, global search, and workspace search.
Yokohama Early Availability
- Restrict index size and increase search performance with guardrails that limit the number of Task and Alert table records indexed for search
- Customize the semantic vector search experience by configuring semantic indexing settings for your indexed sources
- Improve the focus of search results by excluding search sources in a search profile from being used to generate search results or Genius Result answers
- Expand search recall by indexing content from knowledge blocks
- Highlight important search results by boosting relevancy for results that match synonyms in a synonym dictionary
See AI Search for more information.
Important information for upgrading AI Search to Yokohama
When you upgrade to Yokohama from an earlier release, make knowledge block content searchable by reindexing all your indexed sources that include knowledge articles. For details on reindexing, see Perform a full table index or reindex for a single AI Search indexed source or Perform a full table index or reindex for multiple AI Search indexed sources.
New in the Yokohama release
- Yokohama Patch 11
- Improve search precision and contextual relevance with hybrid search
- Beginning with Now Assist in AI Search 15.0, customers with Now Assist in AI Search installed can enable the new hybrid search mode. Hybrid search combines keyword-based search with semantic understanding to deliver more accurate and relevant search results, with fewer zero-result searches.
- Yokohama Patch 3
- Improve semantic search with third-party embedding models
- Use custom and third-party embedding models supported by the AI Search RAG application to generate more accurate and relevant semantic search results.
- Yokohama Early Availability
- Limit the number of Task and Alert records indexed with indexed source guardrails
- Index guardrail settings restrict index size and increase search performance by limiting the number of Task and Alert table records indexed for search.
- Exclude search sources in a search profile from search result or Genius Result generation
- Tune your search results by configuring search source exclusion settings in your search profiles. You can exclude a search source from being used to generate regular search results, Genius Result answers, or both. When excluding a search source's records from Genius Result answer generation, you can also choose to exclude its attachments.
- Knowledge block content indexing
- When you index knowledge articles for search, AI Search now includes content from knowledge blocks to improve search recall. Administrators can disable indexing of knowledge block content if desired.
- Boost relevancy for search results that match synonyms from a synonym dictionary
- Define synonyms in a synonym dictionary and configure a result improvement rule to apply relevancy boosts (positive or negative) to search results that match any of those synonyms.
- Customize semantic indexing settings for indexed sources
- Customize semantic indexing settings for your indexed sources.
- Fuzzy numeric search
- Find records by their Number using numeric search terms like 23583, with no need to match alphabetical prefixes or leading zeroes.
Changed in this release
- Yokohama Patch 11
- Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results
- If you have Now Assist in AI Search installed, Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results are supported in global and workspace search. Activating Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results in global or workspace search profiles overrides all other Genius Result configurations, so that global and workspace searches only display Genius Result answers from Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results. Virtual Agent topic citations from Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Result answers in global or workspace search open the selected topic in the Now Assist panel so the user can continue their conversation on that topic.
- Search Suggestions
- Search administrators with the ais_admin granular admin role can access all Search Suggestions tables. Assign search administrators this role to eliminate needless propagation of full admin access.
- Gain insights into search behavior with a refreshed and updated Search Preview UI.
- Preview search query results using settings from a search application configuration or a search profile. Choose between keyword and hybrid search modes. Display search results as individual EVAM cards or as a JSON-format search query response object, with search and syntax highlighting. Review search query behavior and results and specify search query settings with the new Summary, Genius Results, Details, and Profile admin tools.
- Yokohama Patch 6
- Consumer-grade search experience for search portals
- The search results page for search portals has been revised to offer a more intuitive and consistent experience. Navigation tabs have been replaced with source facet buckets. All search results now open in a new browser tab, preserving your search in the existing browser tab. Facet buckets now show minimum search result counts, reflecting results removed by late binding content security. Search terms are no longer highlighted in search results.
- Consumer-grade search experience for global search and workspace search
- The search results page for global search and workspace search has been revised to offer a more intuitive and consistent experience. Navigation tabs have been replaced with source facet buckets. All search results now open in a new browser tab, preserving your search in the existing browser tab. Facet buckets now show minimum search result counts, reflecting results removed by late binding content security. A new glide.ui.ais.show_all_facets system property enables you to display facets from all sources when no source is selected. (The default behavior is to hide facets until a source is selected.) Search terms are no longer highlighted in search results.
- Sort facet buckets alphabetically
- Override the default sorting of facet buckets by their search result counts and display them sorted alphabetically by their labels.
- Improved display for grouped attachment search results
- When grouped with their parent search results, attachment search results now appear in collapsed form to save space. If a parent search result includes more than three grouped attachments, you can use the new Show more and Show less links to control how many attachments are visible.
Deprecations
Starting with the Now Assist in AI Search 8.0 release, the External Content Q&A Genius Results feature is being prepared for future deprecation. It will continue to be supported until it is deprecated. For details, see the Deprecation Process [KB0867184] article in the Now Support Knowledge Base.
Activation information
AI Search is a ServiceNow AI Platform feature that is active by default.
Browser requirements
AI Search doesn’t support Internet Explorer.
Localization information
AI Search supports international languages. For details of language support by feature, see Internationalization support for AI Search.