Searching means retrieving stored information using an input query. Commonly, the information is in text form, and the queries are words or phrases entered by an end-user. The search results are typically documents relevant to the query, plus an indication of why the documents were retrieved.
Indexing is the process of making documents and other content searchable. This searchable collection is then called the index. During indexing, ATG Search generalizes documents and other content into an abstraction called an content item. A content item consists of two main parts: searchable text content and metadata. Metadata includes the title, summary, and other associated properties. Examples of content items are products in a Commerce repository, HTML files, or structured data from a traditional database.
Within the index, content items are organized into document sets. You can think of these as virtual directory structures, which can offer a variety of routes to reach a particular content item. ATG Search creates some document sets from the physical location of the items, some sets from item metadata, and other sets using categorization results. Document sets allow you to offer users the option to search subsets of the content collection and to browse the collection without query input.
In ATG Search, end-user text queries are embedded by the client application within requests. A request may include parameters, processing options, constraints, security settings, and other information. The two primary request types are the Search Query and the View Item request. After receiving a request, ATG Search returns responses, which contain information that varies depending on the type of request. For a Search Query, the response contains a list of results plus other information to drive the search application or user interface.
