Smart Answers

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SearchStax Smart Answers for Site Search utilizes AI to provide clear, summarized responses to user questions based on the content available on a website. This capability enhances the search experience by delivering direct answers to specific questions, rather than just linking to pages that contain the relevant information.

For instance, a visitor to the SearchStax corporate website might ask, “What security features does Site Search offer?” Smart Answers summarizes the website security content into a succinct list:

By generating direct, natural language answers from your website content, Smart Answers helps visitors discover information faster, engage more deeply, and return to your site more often.

Smart Answers includes the following features:

Feature	Description
AI-generated Answering	Short-form, generative answers based on website content
Context-aware Processing	Understands time-sensitive phrases like “next”, “upcoming”, or “latest”
Source Citations (links)	Each Smart Answer includes up to three links to the most relevant website pages
Search Feedback Mechanism	Users can thumbs up / down generated answers; feedback is tracked in Site Search’s Search Feedback

Availabililty

Smart Answers is available to SearchStax clients on Premium Site Search plans.

How it Works

The Smart Answers feature is triggered by a question in the search field.

1. The visitor submits a keyword query or a natural-language question in the search box. The search page sends this request to Site Search. Site Search returns standard Solr query results.
2. If the query was a question, the search page sends a second request to Site Search, asking for a Smart Answer.
3. Site Search uses AI to analyze the Visitor’s intention. It utilizes the most relevant search results to generate a concise, AI-powered response.
4. The AI-generated answer is displayed at the top of the search results, ensuring immediate visibility.
   1. The answer streams in progressively, allowing users to begin reading without waiting for the full response to load.
   2. By default, after the first 100 characters, a “Read More” button appears, letting users expand the full answer if they wish.
5. (Optional) Visitors can provide feedback by clicking thumbs up or thumbs down, helping improve answer quality over time.

Enabling Smart Answers

Presuming a Premium account with appropriate permissions, the Smart Answers feature is enabled through one of the SearchstaxAnswerWidgets in your custom search page:

• SearchstaxAnswerWidget JS
• SearchstaxAnswerWidget Vue
• SearchstaxAnswerWidget React
• SearchstaxAnswerWidget Angular

The Smart Answers API endpoint (required by the widget) can be found in App Settings > All APIs > Search & Indexing > Smart Answers API.

Smart Answer Feedback

Smart Answers includes a built-in feedback mechanism that allows website visitors to rate the quality of AI-generated answers using simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons. This feedback helps measure the helpfulness of answers and continuously improves the search experience.

The SearchstaxAnswerWidgets can incorporate appropriate Feedback Widgets to capture visitor reactions to the Smart Answer output. The Answer Widget doc pages (listed above) demonstrate how to configure Feedback Widgets for this purpose.

Viewing Smart Answers Feedback

To review user feedback on Smart Answers:

1. Go to Site Search > Analytics > Search Feedback.
2. Feedback entries related to Smart Answers include the following data:
   • The question the visitor asked.
   • The AI-generated answer.
   • The user rating (0 or 10).
   • The date of feedback submission.