Why a Knowledge Graph is Foundational to your Brand | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• Why a knowledge graph is foundational to structuring your data
• Why traditional data storage is ineffective
• How a knowledge graph helps parse natural language queries

Answer the complex questions customers ask

A knowledge graph provides a way to structure your data everywhere that you and your consumers are finding it. It can structure your data internally, for owned properties (such as your website or app), and for 3rd party services.

Customers are being retrained to search in question form using natural language, and are beginning to be confident that they will get answers to increasingly complex questions.

The key is that a knowledge graph is structured in a way that it helps you to answer the complex questions customers are asking.

Let’s take the following search as an example:

“Financial advisor in New York who speaks Mandarin”

There are a number of components to this search but as a human, it’s pretty easy to understand what is being asked for.

However, if this data is not stored intelligently, as real-world entities with their relationships, this search becomes a whole lot harder to understand.

Here’s how it might look if a search engine tried to parse this search and the back-end data was indexed across multiple databases and spreadsheets:

As you can see, the search engine has taken every individual word out of the query and then used those words to see if there is a match.

Google switched to a knowledge graph because traditional index-based search just doesn’t produce the quality of results that users want. What you really need is semantic search, which understands what the customer really means.

If the data was stored in a knowledge graph, it may look something like this:

Data stored in a knowledge graph can be identified as separate entities — in this case, a financial advisor, a location, and a language. If the facts about your brand are stored in disparate systems and as line items in spreadsheets, the entities and the relationships between those entities become impossible to distinguish.

As consumers continue to ask complex questions, on your own website and around the web, it is becoming increasingly important to power those answers with a knowledge graph that structures and interrelates all of the facts about your brand.