Search and the Knowledge Graph | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• How Search integrates with the Knowledge Graph for the frontend
• How Search integrates with the Knowledge Graph for the Search Configuration
• How you can integrate with Third Party Verticals

Search and the Knowledge Graph

Just like Yext’s other products, Search sits on top of the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph impacts Search in 2 critical ways:

1. Helping the algorithm determine the right results
2. Displaying data in the frontend results cards

Remember:

The backend Search Configuration helps to determine how results are selected and specifically which entity types or fields should be searchable in the Search Algorithm and how. For example, you may have 100 fields in your graph, many of which are purpose-built for other products or internal use that you might not want surfaced in Search. We give you the control to set these via what we call Searchable Fields and Direct Answers. You’ll learn more about this in the Verticals Module .

The frontend determines how results are displayed. You can map data on the result cards to fields on an entity, or you can choose to hardcode the values directly. In many cases, the fields that you use in your search configuration are different than the fields you choose to display on cards, which might include things like images or videos.

As you make updates to the Knowledge Graph by changing field values or adding new entities, both order of results and the display of the results will update accordingly — often in a matter of seconds.

Other Data Sources

While much of your data might be stored in the Knowledge Graph, we recognize and recommend that not all of your data will be. There are many use cases where you might want to keep that data in another source of truth and it may not make sense to port over to Yext such as: news articles, blog posts, help articles, and more. Most verticals will be powered by the Knowledge Graph but Yext Search can also include verticals from other data sources, called Third Party Verticals.

Third Party Verticals allow us to search other data sources just like we do the Knowledge Graph and surface results. But we can’t incorporate just anything! In order for this to work, the other data source must have a consumer-grade search API that allows us to pass in searches and get results.

A very common use case of a Third Party Vertical is for adding link-based results as a fallback in your users’ queries. Common solutions that you can plug-in out-of-the-box for this includes, but is not limited to:

• Google Custom Search
• Bing Custom Search
• Swifttype
• SOLR
• Zendesk
• Algolia

Or, you can build your own.