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Introduction | Yext Hitchhikers Platform
Yext Search provides the tools you need to answer your users questions on your website, in your app, or anywhere else people are searching. Build amazing AI-powered search experiences based on natural language understanding and using a multi-algorithm approach.
This guide will walk through step-by-step how to create a Search experience. You’ve learned about this in the Search Backend , Search Frontend Theme , and Search UI React tracks. We recommend completing these tracks first to get familiar with how Search experiences work and what goes into building them.
Once you’ve completed these training tracks, this document will function as a checklist to guide you through the process of implementing a Search experience and share best practices. Review the resources linked for a more in-depth look at the concepts in this guide.
Yext Search
A Yext Search experience is comprised of three components (review the What is a Search Experience unit):
- Yext Knowledge Graph: the index that stores all your data
- Search backend: configures how the Search algorithms determine which results are returned from your Knowledge Graph
- Search frontend: structures how the results are displayed
Once your experience is live, you’ll gain insight into what your users are looking for that you can use to continuously improve the experience.
The steps to building a Search experience are as follows:
- Determine the strategy and scope of your Search experience
- Collect your data and add it to the Yext platform
- Set up the Search backend configuration to query your content
- Set up the Search frontend to display that content
- QA the Search experience
- Integrate onto your site and launch
- Monitor and optimize the experience post-launch
Getting Started
The first thing you need is a Yext account. If you are not yet a Yext customer, you can build a Search experience in sandbox by logging in to Hitchhikers and creating a playground account.
Consider applying a solution template , which will set up your Knowledge Graph entity types and fields, a Search configuration, and a Search frontend site for you. These are built based on industry and are meant to give you a framework to get started. Review the template before applying, apply only the components that are relevant for you, and adjust your account configuration after application (e.g. you may have an additional entity type that was not covered).
If you are applying a solution template in an existing account, do NOT apply resources affecting entity schema unless you are 100% certain it will not cause downstream impacts with existing account configurations (i.e., existing ETL integrations, Listings, Pages, Search, client-developed APIs etc.).
