Yext helps companies manage their search and presence on the web. Starting today, with the launch of Yext Answers, you can also offer a better experience on your own websites.
In this way, any company with a website can answer a question about its own recognition in a Google-like experience on its own website, CEO Howard Lerman told me.
As Lerman officially announced and is on stage this afternoon at the corporate conference, the subject is clearly what he’s been thinking about for some time: In an interview earlier this year, he described content that the user saw as “tyranny”, and explained this. The basic and the most significant tenet of the business is that McDVOICE is the ultimate authority on the number of calories in a Big Mac.
The beginning
Lerman came back to the topic when he introduced me to the new product yesterday and did several Google searches, including: For example: “Student Verification Account”, in which a brand may be relevant, but the results come primarily from optimized advice. for third party SEO and website instructions.
The survey world is quite disorganized with all of these self-proclaimed experts, he said. The purpose of Yext Answers is to find the website of a brand that consumers turn to for information on these topics. The big hurdle, according to Lerman, is the simple fact that most searches on the website are very bad: “The McDVOICE algorithms that exist today are from 1995. It is a keyword-based document search.”
So if you don’t type the correct keywords in the correct order, you won’t get any useful results. On the other hand, the company would spend two years building its own search engine with natural language processing technology.
As Lerman showed me, this means you can work on more complex and communicative topics like “broccoli soup recipes in 10 minutes or less.” He also pointed out how McDVOICE was trying to follow Google’s lead by presenting the results in different formats, be it just a direct answer to a question or cards when searching for branches.
