Spring ‘21 Release is Now Live!

Authors:

Nick Oropall, Senior Manager of Platform Product Marketing
Jessie Smith, Associate Platform Product Marketing Manager
Vic Meyer, Associate Platform Product Marketing Manager

Blog Date: March 2021

Overview

For those of you who are new to Hitchhikers — Welcome to Yext's training platform & community! Hitchhikers is the home for all of Yext's product and release updates so we encourage you to create a free user and check out the platform.

Yext's seasonal releases are always packed with new features and functionality to keep Hitchhikers on the cutting edge of search, and the Spring '21 Release is no different. Across the product suite we have added new features that will help you to drive value and improve your user experience.

Here are just a few of the powerful new features in the Spring '21 Release:

Document Search with Extractive QA

The modern searcher asks complex questions and expects direct, rich results. Sometimes those answers are buried in unstructured long-form documents — like blogs, bios, support articles, product manuals. But your end-user doesn't care how you store the data, they just want an answer. This is why we've added another component to our multi-algorithm story: Document Search, powered by Extractive QA.

With Document Search, Answers can return direct answers to user's questions (via Featured Snippets) by surfacing them from unstructured documents. This is made possible by Extractive QA, which pulls out the relevant snippet using advanced Natural Language Processing technology to match the query's intent to that snippet.

Now you can answer even more questions than ever, regardless of where your data resides. This opens up several new use cases, like helping customers search your support articles, or enabling employees to search an internal knowledge base. With expanded use cases comes greater value for you through reduced support costs, new search intelligence, and increased revenue.

You can read more about configuring this feature in the Document Search Hitchhikers module.

Note: As of the Spring '21 release, Document Search is only available in English.

Data Connectors With the Yext Crawler

The most powerful Knowledge Graphs are robust with data that reflect your entire business. But it can be challenging to unify that data into a single source. This release we are launching Connectors to allow Hitchhikers to easily manage incoming data from a growing number of sources.

A Connector is anything that takes data from a source and transforms it to entities in the Knowledge Graph. Existing sources include: manual inputs, file upload, Site Crawler, or an app like Google My Business, Shopify, Magento, Zendesk, or ServiceNow.

Once you select a Connector source, you can follow a workflow to customize the Connector configuration, including sync frequency, endpoints, and more. This one-stop-shop UI will help you save time and integrate disparate data sources, by managing your integrations in one place.

One new source that we want to highlight is the Crawler. The Yext Crawler helps users scrape web pages to extract content to store in the Knowledge Graph. Our customizability features allow you to extract precise data based on CSS or XPath or use built-in selectors that capture commonly extracted data, like Page Title and Body Content. You can also set a schedule for repeated crawls and blacklist URLs you want to exclude.

Look out for more data connectors that we'll add over time. Have one in mind that you'd like? Let us know in the community!

Answers Search UI SDK, Core SDK, and API

With the Spring '21 Release, you can now create a customized look and feel for your Answers search engine while still using Yext's powerful Answers algorithms. You have several options for building your own frontend including our Answers Search UI SDK (a Javascript library of pre-built components), the Answers Core SDK (a wrapper for the Answers API), and the Answers API. Your choice of method depends on your preferred level of customization and flexibility in the build process. All three of these allow you to build a custom frontend search experience that delivers direct answers to your end-user and perfectly matches the user experience of your website. To learn more, click here.

Don't want to invest in developer resources? You can get your search experience up and running quickly with our out-of-the-box solution — using an Answers Hitchhikers Theme and Jambo within the Yext platform! You can learn more about how Jambo and the Hitchhikers Theme work together in the Hitchhikers Module, Overview of Answers Frontend.

Yext CLI

The Yext Command Line Interface (Yext CLI) provides a new way for Hitchhikers to manage account configurations directly from their local machines. Without ever entering the Yext platform, the Yext CLI enables you to:

  • Edit your Yext Account configuration from your local machine
  • Clone configuration from one Yext Account to another Yext Account
  • Save a version of your account configuration as a backup to revert to when making big changes

Be on the lookout for new functionality that will be added to the Yext CLI during future releases. To get started, you'll need to install the CLI. Once installed, we recommend checking out one of our new guides:

Answers for Authenticated Use Cases

Even within platforms containing sensitive information, people expect great search. In cases of non-public search like employee intranet sites, support sites, or knowledge-base search, users want to find answers quickly and accurately. Yext can provide a layer of security required for these search environments. How does this work? Developers can use their API token to call our secure API token endpoint, which generates a JSON Web Token that can be used as authorization for other calls to Live API. These time-bound tokens can include user context, so that only verified individuals will be able to access Answers results. By powering your platform with Answers, you can make your content more accessible, and drive impactful user action through clear calls-to-action. To learn more about our Secure Token API, click here.

That's not all! To learn more about the Spring '21 Release including demos, deep dives, new publishers and more, check out the Hitchhikers exclusive Sneak Peek: Fall '21 Release webinar recording with Max Shaw, Yext's SVP of Product.

If you have any questions or feedback related to the release, please stop by the Hitchhikers Community. We have specific topics for each release item and will have the experts standing by, ready to answer any questions you have.

We know many of the Hitchhikers will want to check out everything in the Spring '21 release. For the full list of features head to the Spring '21 Release Notes.

All Blog Posts

Determine Location Intent in a Search Engine

Max Shaw, VP Product

One of the most common use cases for a search engine is finding something by a "location". Here are some basic examples: Cardiologist near Green Bay, Notary near me, Restaurants open now. These are all pretty simple queries, but getting these to work in a search engine is much more complex than you might imagine.
Learn More

4 Methods for Increasing Site Search Clicks

Rick Swette, UX Research

We know good search drives business impact. It increases conversions and transactions, reduces search bounce rate, and boosts overall customer satisfaction. So, how do we get more people to trust and use site search? We embarked on a study to find this out.
Learn More

How to Measure the Success of Your Site Search

Basil Polsonetti, Data Insights

Most brands know that site search is a feature their website should have, but unless the site is dominated by e-commerce, it’s often relegated as a check-the-box task when building a new website.
Learn More

The Danger in Document-Level Sentiment Analysis

Calvin Casalino, Senior Product Manager

In order for your feedback to become an actionable item to help businesses provide a better experience, they need a way to analyze the granular content of all of their reviews, at scale.
Learn More

Deep Dive into Duplicate Suppression

Dee Luo, Product Manager

Brands know the importance of having accurate information across all the apps, maps, and directories where consumers are searching for information. In a perfect world, powering that brand data and managing each of these listings would be enough to ensure that consumers consistently get the answers they're searching for.
Learn More

Yext Answers Algorithm Update: Milky Way

Max Shaw, VP Product

Yext Answers is constantly improving it’s search algorithm to provide more relevant results over time. Milky Way is the first official upgrade to the Answers Algorithm and includes a series of important upgrades to provide better search precision and recall.
Learn More

GMB API Update - Dedicated Food Menus

Dee Luo, Product Manager

On August 24, 2020, Google launched version 4.7 of its Google My Business (GMB) API. This update includes enhancements to how your restaurant locations can sync and display food menus on Google.
Learn More

Structuring Your Knowledge Graph

Jessie Yorke, Yext Administrator

In this post we are going to discuss strategy and give you some tools to effectively think about structuring your own brand's Knowledge Graph!
Learn More

Welcome to the Hitchhikers Program

Liz Frailey, VP Developer & Admin Experience

Welcome to Hitchhikers! We are so excited to have you join our mission of creating amazing search experiences for brands of all sizes.
Learn More

Introducing: Yext Answers Plugin for WordPress

Alex Barbet, Product

Businesses of all sizes use both WordPress and Yext to build amazing client experiences, and as more and more brands around the world add the Yext Answers bar to their WordPress powered sites, we wanted to provide a way to drive their time-to-value even faster.
Learn More

Yext’s Fall ‘20 Release is Now Live!

Nick Oropall, Senior Product Marketing Manager

For those of you who are new to Hitchhikers — Welcome to Yext's new training platform & community! Hitchhikers will be the home for all of Yext's product and release updates moving forward so we encourage you to create a free user and check out the platform!
Learn More

Meet the Hitchhikers Team: Alyssa Hubbard

Alyssa Hubbard

Alyssa Hubbard began at Yext in the Upward Rotational Program. Now she is full-time on the Hitchhikers team, working to build a platform to empower our community of Yext power users.
Learn More

Yext Answers Algorithm Update: Andromeda

Allie Allegra, Senior Product Marketing Manager

We are constantly making improvements to the underlying Answers algorithm. Our latest algorithm release, Andromeda, includes cutting edge improvements that optimize the overall search experience. With this release, our algorithm now has the ability to search semi-structured data. You can now opt-in to access these improvements depending on your configuration.
Learn More

WCAG and Search: Developing an Accessible Search Experience

Rose Grant, Associate Product Manager

What’s WCAG? WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG is not always black and white; its rules often have a variety of interpretations.
Learn More

Now Available: Shopify Product Catalog Sync for Yext

Lilly Fast, Senior Business Development Manager

Shoppers have questions about your products, and your ability to answer will determine if they buy or if they bounce. But with rapid changes to your business, it can be hard to keep your product information consistently up-to-date.
Learn More

Now Available: Yext Product Catalog Sync for Magento Commerce, an Adobe Company

Lilly Fast, Senior Business Development Manager

Shoppers have questions about your products, and your ability to answer will determine if they buy or if they bounce. But with rapid changes to your business, it can be hard to keep your product information consistently up-to-date.
Learn More

A New Way to Search FAQS

Max Davish, Associate Product Manager

Semantic search is a new way of searching for FAQs. Instead of looking at keywords, it measures the similarity in meaning between two questions. Answers does this using BERT - the same revolutionary natural language processing technology that powers other Answers features like location detection and entity recognition.
Learn More

How to Build Discoverable and High-Converting Landing Pages

Sonia Elavia, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Search is a massively important marketing channel. Fifty-three percent of website traffic comes from organic search, so it’s critical that businesses optimize for these experiences. But how do you actually build out a strong presence in organic search? Having search-optimized landing pages is critical.
Learn More

Exporters: From Yext to Your Listings

Calvin Casalino, Senior Product Manager

Our Listings delivery pipeline ensures your data stored in the Knowledge Graph appears on Listings everywhere consumers are asking questions. How do we make sure your data is updated on all publishers as quickly as possible while still ensuring data is formatted properly for each endpoint? Yext’s Listings exporters.
Learn More

2020: Hitchhikers Year in Review

Liz Frailey, VP Developer & Admin Experience

2020 has been a rollercoaster of a year for everyone for a multitude of reasons. On the Hitchhikers Team, we were able to overcome some of the year's obstacles to really transform the program.
Learn More

Understanding the Answers Algorithm

Pierce Stegman, Data Scientist & Michael Misiewicz, Data Science Manager

See for yourself how the Answers algorithm works on the Understanding the Answers Algorithm site built by our Data Science team!
Learn More

A Type System for Knowledge Graph Entities

Oscar Li, Software Engineering Lead

Our type system serves as the foundation of the Knowledge Graph by dictating the structure, validation, and display of fields. The type system guarantees the consistency and correctness of any field value retrieved from the Knowledge Graph. This makes it easier for our engineers to reason about code that handles particular fields, for our customers to manage their entity data, and for our publishers to trust the quality of our data.
Learn More

3 Integrations That Can Help You Get More Out of Yext

Jonathan Gitlin, Content Marketing Manager, Workato

As a Yext user, you’re likely well aware of the platform’s product suite and the value each solution delivers. But did you know that you can provide even better search results for visitors, collect more reviews from customers, and analyze data more closely by integrating Yext with the apps and systems your team already uses?
Learn More

Google’s Latest API Update: More Hours

Teddy Riker, Associate Product Manager

On February 25th, 2021, Google launched version 4.9 of its Google My Business (GMB) API. This update includes support for additional hours types, for options such as delivery, drive through, and more.
Learn More

Spring ‘21 Release is Now Live!

Nick Oropall, Senior Manager of Platform Product Marketing

Yext's seasonal releases are always packed with new features and functionality to keep Hitchhikers on the cutting edge of search, and the Spring '21 Release is no different. Across the product suite, we have added new features that will help you to drive value and improve your user experience.
Learn More

Overview

For those of you who are new to Hitchhikers — Welcome to Yext's training platform & community! Hitchhikers is the home for all of Yext's product and release updates so we encourage you to create a free user and check out the platform.


Yext's seasonal releases are always packed with new features and functionality to keep Hitchhikers on the cutting edge of search, and the Spring '21 Release is no different. Across the product suite we have added new features that will help you to drive value and improve your user experience.

Here are just a few of the powerful new features in the Spring '21 Release:

Document Search with Extractive QA

The modern searcher asks complex questions and expects direct, rich results. Sometimes those answers are buried in unstructured long-form documents — like blogs, bios, support articles, product manuals. But your end-user doesn't care how you store the data, they just want an answer. This is why we've added another component to our multi-algorithm story: Document Search, powered by Extractive QA.

With Document Search, Answers can return direct answers to user's questions (via Featured Snippets) by surfacing them from unstructured documents. This is made possible by Extractive QA, which pulls out the relevant snippet using advanced Natural Language Processing technology to match the query's intent to that snippet.


Now you can answer even more questions than ever, regardless of where your data resides. This opens up several new use cases, like helping customers search your support articles, or enabling employees to search an internal knowledge base. With expanded use cases comes greater value for you through reduced support costs, new search intelligence, and increased revenue.

You can read more about configuring this feature in the Document Search Hitchhikers module.

Note: As of the Spring '21 release, Document Search is only available in English.

Data Connectors With the Yext Crawler

The most powerful Knowledge Graphs are robust with data that reflect your entire business. But it can be challenging to unify that data into a single source. This release we are launching Connectors to allow Hitchhikers to easily manage incoming data from a growing number of sources.

A Connector is anything that takes data from a source and transforms it to entities in the Knowledge Graph. Existing sources include: manual inputs, file upload, Site Crawler, or an app like Google My Business, Shopify, Magento, Zendesk, or ServiceNow.

Once you select a Connector source, you can follow a workflow to customize the Connector configuration, including sync frequency, endpoints, and more. This one-stop-shop UI will help you save time and integrate disparate data sources, by managing your integrations in one place.


One new source that we want to highlight is the Crawler. The Yext Crawler helps users scrape web pages to extract content to store in the Knowledge Graph. Our customizability features allow you to extract precise data based on CSS or XPath or use built-in selectors that capture commonly extracted data, like Page Title and Body Content. You can also set a schedule for repeated crawls and blacklist URLs you want to exclude.

Look out for more data connectors that we'll add over time. Have one in mind that you'd like? Let us know in the community!

Answers Search UI SDK, Core SDK, and API

With the Spring '21 Release, you can now create a customized look and feel for your Answers search engine while still using Yext's powerful Answers algorithms. You have several options for building your own frontend including our Answers Search UI SDK (a Javascript library of pre-built components), the Answers Core SDK (a wrapper for the Answers API), and the Answers API. Your choice of method depends on your preferred level of customization and flexibility in the build process. All three of these allow you to build a custom frontend search experience that delivers direct answers to your end-user and perfectly matches the user experience of your website. To learn more, click here.

Don't want to invest in developer resources? You can get your search experience up and running quickly with our out-of-the-box solution — using an Answers Hitchhikers Theme and Jambo within the Yext platform! You can learn more about how Jambo and the Hitchhikers Theme work together in the Hitchhikers Module, Overview of Answers Frontend.

Yext CLI

The Yext Command Line Interface (Yext CLI) provides a new way for Hitchhikers to manage account configurations directly from their local machines. Without ever entering the Yext platform, the Yext CLI enables you to:

  • Edit your Yext Account configuration from your local machine
  • Clone configuration from one Yext Account to another Yext Account
  • Save a version of your account configuration as a backup to revert to when making big changes


Be on the lookout for new functionality that will be added to the Yext CLI during future releases. To get started, you'll need to install the CLI. Once installed, we recommend checking out one of our new guides:

Answers for Authenticated Use Cases

Even within platforms containing sensitive information, people expect great search. In cases of non-public search like employee intranet sites, support sites, or knowledge-base search, users want to find answers quickly and accurately. Yext can provide a layer of security required for these search environments. How does this work? Developers can use their API token to call our secure API token endpoint, which generates a JSON Web Token that can be used as authorization for other calls to Live API. These time-bound tokens can include user context, so that only verified individuals will be able to access Answers results. By powering your platform with Answers, you can make your content more accessible, and drive impactful user action through clear calls-to-action. To learn more about our Secure Token API, click here.


That's not all! To learn more about the Spring '21 Release including demos, deep dives, new publishers and more, check out the Hitchhikers exclusive Sneak Peek: Fall '21 Release webinar recording with Max Shaw, Yext's SVP of Product.

If you have any questions or feedback related to the release, please stop by the Hitchhikers Community. We have specific topics for each release item and will have the experts standing by, ready to answer any questions you have.

We know many of the Hitchhikers will want to check out everything in the Spring '21 release. For the full list of features head to the Spring '21 Release Notes.