Refining Business Search Listings With AI: Yext Launches “Milky Way”

Yext Answers receives a comprehensive update to surface more accurate and relevant results

Yext, the search engine experience cloud company, yesterday released “Milky Way” – its latest upgrade to Yext Answers. The machine learning framework sourced from Google will help the company enhance its natural language processing (NLP) search algorithm that powers its site search product.

Yext has integrated Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) from Google to improve user search capabilities. Yext Answers can now improve its ability to distinguish locations from other types of entities such as people, jobs, and events.

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“When we launched Yext Answers last year, we introduced a new standard of search for websites — and since launch, we’ve been improving our algorithm constantly to understand natural language questions and help businesses respond to those questions quickly and accurately,” said Marc Ferrentino, chief strategy officer at Yext. “Today, Milky Way marks our latest major upgrade to the Answers algorithm, leveraging BERT technology so that businesses can answer even more customer questions with greater precision.”

Key highlights of the Milky Way update include:

• Better named entity recognition: BERT enables Yext Answers to decipher the contextual relationship between search terms. When users search for terms that could refer to multiple entities, Answers will return a more relevant result by analyzing intent. For instance, Yext Answers will be able to better distinguish between a “turkey” sandwich and a sandwich shop in “Turkey.” Yext’s algorithm will locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructured text into predefined categories – providing a more intent-friendly search experience. 
• Location accuracy: “Milky Way” allows Yext Answers to overcome location biasing by filtering through stored locations by businesses in their Yext knowledge graph – a database of structured information – to provide the closest match. Yext will no longer rely on information like popularity and proximity to provide location results. This is particularly helpful if the search team could refer to multiple places, such as Birmingham, Alabama vs. Birmingham, UK.
• Improved healthcare taxonomy: Yext has added over 3,000 new healthcare-related synonyms, conditions, treatments, and procedures to its taxonomy. For instance, if a user types in “pink eye” or uses a more clinical term (“conjunctivitis”), Yext Answers will be able to understand the context and deliver the best answer.
• Updated stemming and typo tolerance: A key outcome of better intent-driven capabilities is Yext’s ability to recognize different variations of a root word – and refined typo tolerance to provide more accurate search results that include variations of that term, such as “ability” and “abilities”. The added flexibility will help businesses answer questions that would otherwise provide few or no results at all.

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What This Mean for Businesses?

The “Milky Way” update marks the platform’s latest major update since it launched four new languages on the site. The release also furthers the promise of more accurate, relevant listings for businesses that will expand its reach.

Given the current economic climate, local businesses could certainly benefit from Text citations and reach a broader customer-base. The company that started out as an SEO provider has diversified into mid-market and large enterprises with Yext Answers, Yext Pages, and Yext Reviews. It has also grown internationally into European and Asian markets. Earlier this year, the company announced that it has tied up with Accor hotels, one of the largest European hospitality chains and that it will open a new office in Tokyo, Japan.

With Yext Answers, the company is no longer tied to businesses with physical store locations and can offer listing services to any company with a website, making it more relevant for a post-COVID future where commerce will increasingly go digital.

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Businesses using Yext Answers can now tap into the company’s massive knowledge graph that houses over 277 million structured facts to drive better revenue outcomes. Additionally, the company’s investments in AI and machine learning will enable businesses optimize for voice search and conversational commerce.

As consumers expect brands to provide a specific answer to their specific questions such as a simple question like “Alexa, when does the nearest McDonald’s close today?” or more complex (long-string) questions like “Ok google, find me a size 10 casual sneakers that are black and released in the last 6 months” using Yext, brands can provide exact answers to these questions using AI and its knowledge graph.

The company is already a leader in search directory management, and its latest update will help it cement its position as the search provider for choice for businesses in a post-COVID era.