NEW YORK, March 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Yext, Inc. (NYSE:
YEXT), the Answers Search Company, today announced its Spring '21
Release, one of the most significant platform updates in the
company's history. With the release, highlighted by the "Orion"
search algorithm update and a number of critical, innovative
features, including extractive QA, a website crawler, data
connectors, and developer tools for Answers, the company now allows
businesses to deliver even better and more diverse search
experiences to their customers.
"Natural language processing has never been more advanced,
making exceptional search experiences possible — yet most
businesses still use keyword search technology that hasn't changed
much since the late '90s," said Marc
Ferrentino, Chief Strategy Officer of Yext. "With our new
Spring Release features, we're making our search platform better,
faster, and ultimately cheaper for those looking to transform their
businesses with modern, answers-led search."
The Yext Spring '21 Release includes the following features,
which are available for early access:
- Document Search powered by Extractive Question Answering (QA):
Unlike traditional keyword search, Yext's platform leverages
multiple advanced NLP algorithms to deliver a modern, exceptional
search experience drawing from structured and semi-structured data.
Its latest addition, extractive QA, adds a powerful dimension to
the platform by answering complex questions against unstructured,
long-form documents. When someone asks a specific question, whether
it's the difference between a 401(k) and a Roth IRA on a bank's
website or how to assemble a product on a retailer's site,
extractive QA looks at the unstructured data from a business's
webpages, blog posts, help articles, and product manuals in their
unique knowledge graph (a brain-like database of facts) to find the
most relevant word, sentence, or paragraph, and then delivers a
direct answer in the form of a rich snippet at the top of the
results page.
- Data Connectors, Including Website Crawler: It can be a
challenge for brands to centralize the data they need to populate
their knowledge graphs — whether it's support articles, product
information, professional records, or another source — to answer
their customers' complex questions. Yext's new data connectors
streamline this process by offering a low-code, point-and-click way
to add data sources and transform them into structured facts. This
includes a website crawler that can scan a business's website and
extract data to be loaded into their knowledge graph.
- Developer Tools: Developers now have everything they need to
interact with the Yext platform and build custom solutions on their
own. Users can manage their account configuration without logging
into the Yext platform using the new Yext Command Line Interface
(CLI), and build a completely custom Answers front end with two new
Answers SDKs and a direct Answers API.
- Authenticated Use Cases: To meet strong demand for search
experiences that live behind a firewall, Yext has introduced new
security measures that allow businesses to deploy Answers for
authenticated, employee-facing use cases, from company intranet
search for employees to support search for agents. Yext's new
security page will outline all of the details of the company's
related best practices, certifications, and protocols.
Yext's Founder and CEO Howard
Lerman and Chief Strategy Officer Marc Ferrentino will be joining members of the
company's product and engineering teams in a Clubhouse talk titled
"Tech Happy Hour: Join Yext at the [Search] Bar" to discuss the
announcement at 9 p.m. (ET) today.
Reporters are welcome to join the room as listeners or raise their
hand to ask questions.
Visit the Spring '21 Release Notes here for more
information and join the Clubhouse talk here at 9 p.m. (ET).
About Yext
The ultimate source for official answers
about a business online should be the business itself. However,
when consumers ask questions on company websites, too often they
are left in the dark with wrong answers. Yext (NYSE: YEXT), the
Search Experience Cloud, solves this problem by organizing a
business's facts so it can provide official answers to consumer
questions — wherever people search. Starting with the company
website, then extending across search engines and voice assistants,
businesses around the world, like T-Mobile, Jaguar Land Rover, BBVA
USA, and Kiehl's — as well as
organizations like the U.S. State Department and World Health
Organization — trust Yext to radically improve the search
experience on their websites and across the entire search
ecosystem.
Yext's mission is to help businesses and organizations around
the world deliver official answers everywhere people search. Yext
has been named a Best Place to Work by Fortune and Great Place to
Work®, as well as a Best Workplace for Women. Yext is headquartered
in New York City with offices in
Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Dallas, Geneva, London, Miami, Milan,
Paris, San Francisco, Shanghai, Tokyo, and the Washington, D.C. area.
CONTACT: Amanda Kontor,
pr@yext.com
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SOURCE Yext, Inc.