Result improvement rules
Summarize
Summary of Result Improvement Rules
Result improvement rules in the ServiceNow AI Platform allow administrators to define conditions that modify search results by boosting, blocking, or promoting specific entries based on user context or search parameters. These rules enhance the relevance of search outcomes, helping users find the most pertinent information quickly.
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Key Features
- Rule Structure: Each rule consists of conditions that determine activation and actions that define how results are modified. Actions can be of one type: boost, block, or promote.
- Conditions: Includes date ranges, language specifications, and trigger conditions based on search queries or user context.
- Actions:
- Boost: Increases relevancy for records with specific values.
- Block: Excludes certain records from results.
- Promote: Displays selected records at the top of search results.
- Language Dependence: Activation of rules is based on the specified language, supporting all languages in the instance.
- Interaction with Search Features: Rules interact with features like lemma normalization, stop words, synonyms, and typo handling, ensuring relevant triggers under various search conditions.
Key Outcomes
By implementing result improvement rules, ServiceNow customers can significantly enhance search experiences by controlling which results users see based on contextual relevance. This leads to improved user satisfaction and efficiency in locating critical information.
Define rules with configurable trigger conditions to boost, block, or promote search results for specific searches. You can also boost search results for documents matching elements of the user context, such as a user's country, OS, or device type.
Result improvement rules with boost actions override the default search result order produced by the AI Search machine learning relevancy feature. Rules with block or promote actions override the default result set for a search query.
Rule structure
- A set of conditions that determine when the rule activates.
- A set of boost, block, or promote actions that determine how the rule modifies the search query's results when activated. The rule can only include actions of a single type, but can include multiple actions of that type.
- A date range bounded by start and end dates. The rule can only activate during the specified date range.
- A language. The rule can only activate if this language matches the search query's language.
- Optionally, a set of one or more trigger conditions. Triggers can operate on individual search query keywords, the full search query, or elements of the search user's context such as their department, language, or browser version. The rule can only activate if all of its trigger conditions are met.
- Boost: Increase the relevancy scores for search result records that include specific field values. You can use either of the following options:
- Boost search result records that include field values matching a dynamically populated value from the user context.
- Boost search result records that include field values matching a static value that you specify.
- Block: Exclude specific records from the search query's results.
- Promote: Display specific records at the start of the search query's results.
Block actions take precedence over promote actions. If two rules block and promote the same record, AI Search excludes the record from the search query's results.
Language dependence
Result improvement rule activation is language-dependent. You specify a language for each result improvement rule.
AI Search supports result improvement rules for all languages activated in your instance. For the list of languages you can activate, see Activate a language.
Interaction with other search features
The following table describes interactions between result improvement rules with Query triggers and other search features.
| Feature | Interaction with result improvement rules |
|---|---|
| Lemma and Unicode normalization | A search query term added by lemma or Unicode normalization can trigger a result improvement rule if it matches the rule's Query trigger. |
| Stop words | If a search query term that matches a result improvement rule's Query trigger is defined as a stop word, AI Search evaluates the rule trigger before removing the stop word from the search query. |
| Synonyms | By default, a synonym expansion term can activate a result improvement rule if it matches the rule's Query trigger. You can prevent synonym expansion terms from activating a rule with a Query trigger by clearing the Expand Synonyms For Query Conditions option that appears when you define the Query trigger. |
| Typo handling | An auto-corrected search query term can trigger a result improvement rule if it matches the rule's Query trigger. |