Grouping your search configurations by segment ensures that the search results a user sees are tailored to the buying habits or other characteristics of that user. When a search configuration folder specifies segment as its dimension type, each asset added to it must specify a given segment or the All Others option.
To use segments as a dimension, you need to create segments in the ATG Business Control Center as described in the Creating User Segments chapter of the ATG Business Control Center Administration and Development Guide. Then you need to make those segments available as options, by adding them to the Merchandising list, as follows:
From the Segment List view of the Browse tab, click Merchandising.
In the Details pane, update the list of segments:
Add a segment by clicking Add. When the Select an Item dialog box opens, navigate to the segment, click the check box beside it, and click OK. If you don’t see the set of segments you expected, your site administrator should make sure that the correct modules are running.
Rearrange the position of a segment in the list by changing the number beside it. To preview the new order, click Reorder. The order you provide here doesn’t affect how segments appear in other Merchandising lists.
Remove a segment from the list by clicking the Delete button beside the segment.
Click Save.
About Removing Segments
If you remove a segment from a segment list, you make it unavailable for use in ATG Merchandising, which means that you can’t select it to be the dimension for search configurations or search configuration folders. A segment may already be assigned to a search configuration, for example, when it is removed, in which case the segment remains usable only for that search configuration. If, however, a segment is deleted from the ATG Business Control Center, that segment becomes unusable by all applications. Any search configuration or search configuration folder with a deleted segment can be deployed but will never be applied because, although the segment may appear in ATG Merchandising, it won’t be visible to ATG Search. Because there won’t be any visitor attributes associated with the resource that uses the deleted segment, that resource will never be applied.
