Service Portal displays search results data within a widget on the search page. To make data searchable from Service Portal, you can fetch data from a single table within your ServiceNow instance, from multiple ServiceNow tables, or from an external site.

Search engines

AI Search

AI Search provides a modern consumer-grade search engine that is faster and more assistive than the legacy Zing search engine. Portal users can find answers more quickly and easily with features like auto-complete search queries, natural language support, and typo handling. AI Search is only supported in Service Portal, Employee Center (ESC), Consumer Service Portal, and Customer Service Portal. Custom portals must be built off a baseline of one of these portals to have the AI Search capability.

Zing
Zing is the legacy text indexing and search engine originally used by Service Portal. Some portals still use this search engine by default.

Search analytics and suggestions

Generate relevant search suggestions for your users and monitor search analytics to understand what your users are searching for and whether they're finding what they need. Search Suggestions is a Now Platform feature. For more information, see Search Suggestions.

Generate suggestions from custom widgets
By default, the Search Events [sys_search_event] and Search Source Events [sys_search_source_event] tables collect search data from base system search widgets. To generate search analytics from custom Service Portal search widgets, use the GlideSPSearchAnalytics API. For more information, see GlideSPSearchAnalytics.

Performance recommendations

To avoid performance degradation and to ensure a fast search experience for end users, follow these recommendations.

  • Limit search sources when possible to perform only the necessary query. For example, if a search only needs to return active incidents, add a condition to the search source set to [Active] [is] [true]. A search that queries only active incidents is faster than a search that queries all records in the incident table.
  • Create facet items and mapped queries with no more than 30 filter items. To verify, test each search source with a variety of keywords as a user with low permissions.
Note: Service Portal search results display as text only. HTML tags, images, and formatting do not display in search results.