Search Quality | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• How Yext thinks about search quality
• What factors play into search quality
• How you can help contribute to search quality

What is Search Quality

Bad search is… well, it’s bad. If someone searches on your site, they are giving you the ultimate indicator of their intent and if your site fails to meet their intent, they’ll likely go elsewhere — oftentimes, back to Google. On Google, they’ll find your competitors or, more often than not, they’ll simply get distracted. At that point, you’ve wasted all of the money you spent trying to attain that customer.

We can all agree that search quality matters. But it’s hard! And it’s never a one-and-done sort of thing because:

• Customers search trends change (e.g., longer searches)
• Your brand changes (e.g., new products, new events)
• The market and world around us changes (e.g., Covid19, macro-trends or fads)

At Yext, we have hundreds of people that are benchmarking and evaluating queries, training and testing our machine learning algorithms, and helping to make sure the results your customers get are as good as they can be. All of this data impacts the Yext Algorithm.

But as you’ve already learned, the Algorithm doesn’t act alone. The Algorithm partners with the Search Configuration to understand how to interpret the data in the Knowledge Graph.

Search Quality Levers

When we talk about improving Search Quality, there are three levers at play:

• The Yext Algorithm
• Your Search Configuration
• Your Knowledge Graph

If someone searches for financial advisor who speaks mandarin and gets no results – why is that? Well…

Knowledge Graph

• Do you have financial advisors in the Knowledge Graph?
• Do you have a field for languages on the financial advisor?
• Is the languages field on the financial advisor filled out?
• Do you actually have any financial advisors that speak Mandarin?

If you responded “no” to any of the above, there’s your answer! The algorithm can’t magically get the answer without the data. You’ll need to get this data into the Knowledge Graph as a first step. Or, if none of your financial advisors speak Mandarin — maybe you need to talk to HR about hiring if it’s a popular search term.

Search Configuration

• Have you defined a vertical for Financial Advisors?
• Have you specified the “languages” field as a searchable field within the financial advisors Vertical?

If you responded “no” to any of the above, there’s your answer! The algorithm needs to know how to interpret the Knowledge Graph. To fix this, you can easily update the Search Configuration to index “languages” for financial advisors, and immediately improve your search results.

Algorithm

If all of the above is true, and you are still not seeing any results, it may be an issue with the algorithm. You should alert your Yext Admin or contact Support for assistance. You can also help to inform our algorithm by scoring search term relevance in the platform. This is one of the most powerful ways you can impact the Yext Search Algorithm.

You’ll learn more about Search Quality levers and Scoring Search Terms in the Debugging and Post-Launch Optimization modules.