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Launcher screens › Mobile app components › Building mobile apps › Mobile Platform
Release: Australia · Updated: 2026-03-12 · Official documentation · View source

Global search for mobile

Give your users the ability to search for information within the defined search sources from a mobile app.

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Global search bar

You can include a global search bar on your launcher screen. Use search to give your users the ability to quickly find information within the defined search sources. Examples include people, catalog items, and knowledge base articles in your instance.

There are two search engines available to activate within launcher screens.

  • Zing - The default search engine used to search ServiceNow AI Platform® record data. For more information, see Zing text indexing and search engine.
  • AI Search - AI search engine available for Now Mobile, which offers visually intelligent query features to help users quickly find the answers they need. For more information see, AI Search.

Search criteria

Create search criteria for your launcher screen to help your users find related information quickly. You can configure which sources the search uses, as well as options like search result limits. For details on configuring custom search criteria:

Note: AI Search utilizes the data sources of catalog items, KB articles and users. Use AI Search, wherever possible, when using these data sources. Use Zing in the launcher screen if you utilize other data sources not associated with AI Search, for example user tasks or requests.

Voice search enables your users to use global search using the speech recognition feature of their mobile device. Users access voice search by tapping the microphone icon (

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Microphone icon\) that appears on the right side of a search bar. For more information on configuring voice search, see [Enable voice search](turn-on-voice-search.md).

Photo search enables users to use global search by taking a picture. The Google Vision API identifies the picture and uses that identification as search query. Users access photo search by tapping photo icon (

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Photo search icon\) that appears in your launcher screen search bar. For more information on photo search, see [Mobile photo search](sg-mobile-image-search.md).