Streams Powered Search
Background
Yext Search Engineering is about to turn on Streams Powered Search, a new way of sourcing data for Search. The main goal for engineering here is to move to a new cleaner infrastructure and to enable new functionality, like multi-hop search. Even though this should result in little to no changes in your Search experiences, we wanted Hitchhikers to keep an eye out on their experiences as we make this large change and let us know if anything seems wrong.
Potential Expected Changes
Streams Powered Search may have some small changes compared to your existing search experience.
Primary only Fields with NLP Filters & Phrase Match - Before Primary Only Fields were not being processed in a language specific fashion for nlp filters and phrase match. So if you had a language specific term stored in a primary only field, we’d try to process it in a language neutral way when matching nlp filters & phrase matches. This often caused nlp filters & phrase matches NOT to occur since language neutral processing does not work as well with fields in non-English languages.
Since we’ve noticed most Search experiences had NOT been using Primary Only Fields in a language neutral manner, we now process the nlp filters & phrase matches for primary only fields in a language specific fashion, just like any other field. This largely results in nlp filters & phrase matches on primary only fields now matching due to stemming in English, or removing accents in European languages. The end change, if any, is that nlp filters on primary only fields match more often than they used to and we’ve found this to be an improvement across many accounts.
Full Text Sort Order - As a consequence of our Streams Search project, we’ve noticed in some cases that the sort order of similarly ranked fields for full text search sometimes changes from the old to the new system. This is mostly due to the fact that we’re no longer indexing some unnecessary data (data that wasn’t being searched) in our new system. Thus the relevance calculations are more accurate.
Who to Contact About Concerns
If you see any obvious errors in your account (500s / error messages in your API response) or if you see changes or problems outside of the previously listed ones that you’re not sure about, feel free to post in the Hitchhiker community with any relevant details and we’ll get to it as soon as we can. Thanks!