Using Custom Search Engines in Chrome to Quickly Navigate ServiceNow

How often have you wanted to do something like look up a record in a table by sys_id, look up a user by user_name, or jump straight to a table in ServiceNow just so you can run a query on it, but found yourself having to wait for the entire table to load, or having to navigate through several pages, waiting for each to load before you can get to the next?
For me, the answer is “multiple times, every single day”.

To that end, I’ve made this video on how to use custom Google Chrome search engines to make this process incredibly simple! Below the video, you’ll find some examples of useful “custom search engines” I’ve used in Chrome.

Example custom search engines

Tables

Jump to a table (filter only) with the keyword table:
https://INSTANCE.service-now.com/nav_to.do?uri=%s_list.do?sysparm_filter_only=true

Jump to any table with the filter, and the header columns, if you prefer (I recommend using either this, or the above URL, with the keyword table):
https://INSTANCE.service-now.com/nav_to.do?uri=%s_list.do?sysparm_query=sys_id=-1

Search the Users table by user_name (Replace STARTSWITH with LIKE to do a “contains” query by default instead):
https://INSTANCE.service-now.com/nav_to.do?uri=sys_user_list.do?sysparm_query=user_nameSTARTSWITH%s
This is especially helpful for identifying users from the user names you might find in fields like sys_created_by or sys_updated_by.

Tools

Jump to the schema map for a given table, without loading all of the related tables and columns by default (which makes the initial load excessively slow when you just want to see one or two pieces of that data):
https://INSTANCE.service-now.com/generic_hierarchy_erd.do?sysparm_attributes=table_history=,table=%s,show_internal=true,show_referenced=false,show_referenced_by=false,show_extended=false,show_extended_by=false,table_expansion=,spacing_x=60,spacing_y=90,nocontext

Global Search

Jump to the global text search of your instance and search by a given term, using the following URL:
https://INSTANCE.service-now.com/textsearch.do?sysparm_search=%s
You can add additional custom search sources and groups to the global text search, too. Here’s an article from ServiceNow’s docs site on that.

Pro-tip: Create separate custom search engines for environments you use often! For example, try the keyword “devtable” instead of “table” to do the same query in your dev environment!

If you’ve got any useful custom search engines of your own, feel free to leave them in the comments below this post!

This idea was suggested by Ian Brown on Reddit. Thanks for the pro-tip, Ian!