Assets at the same level in the tree are applied in the order they appear in the tree. For site visitors who fall into two segments, the first search configuration that appears in the tree is used.
For example, consider an English visitor who is part of the Subscribes to the New York Times segment. Search locates the correct search configuration by beginning at the top of the tree with the French configuration folder. Because French is not the visitor’s language, Search skips immediately to English for which the visitor is a match. Search then checks the search configurations in that branch, stopping at Subscribes to the New York Times because the visitor satisfies all of its requirements.
Likewise, if a site organizes search configurations by language, and one dimension value is a superset of another (en and en_US, for example), placing the search configuration that uses en higher in the tree prevents the en_US search configuration from being used because all site visitors who use en_US also use en.
Had the visitor used any language other than the two identified, the All Others search configuration folder branch would have been traversed. All Others is a dimension value available to both search configurations and search configuration folders to represent visitors for whom none of the other search configurations apply. For example, a visitor who has never identified newspaper preferences on a user profile page or has no recorded purchasing history uses the search configuration with the All Others dimension value.
The ordering principle applies to the All Other dimension as well, so putting a search configuration with All Others at the top of the tree would cause it to be used for every site visitor, thereby negating the other search configurations. For that reason, the search configuration or search configuration folder with the All Others value always appears at the bottom of the tree within a given level.
When Search Configurations and Search Configuration Folders are on the Same Level
The following hierarchy has search configurations and search configuration folders on the same level in the tree:
In this example, Subscribers to Le Monde, Subscribes to the New York Times, and Subscribes to the Wall Street Journal are search configurations because the same settings should be applied to all visitors in these groups regardless of language. Search configurations that are on the same level as search configuration folders always appear at the top of the list, which causes them to be considered first. A visitor who is part of both the Subscribes to the New York Times and News Junkie (English) segments sees search results that coincide with the Subscribes to the New York Times search configuration because it comes first in the list. The only exception is for a search configuration that has a dimension value of All Others, which will always be considered last.
Notice that there is no search configuration on the same level as a folder with dimension value of All Others. Merchandising prevents you from making this selection because such a search configuration would divert all visitors away from any search configuration or search configuration folder beneath it on the tree.
In short, the top of a given level begins with a group of search configurations followed by search configuration folders and if one has a dimension value of All Others, it appears last in the list.
Implicit Language Inheritance
When you specify language as a dimension type for a search configuration folder, the search configurations and sub-folders it contains must specify a language that ensures that only the site visitors for whom that language is appropriate access that resource.
Every search configuration uses language to restrict the site visitors to whom it applies. This is true even for those search configurations that do not have a language dimension configured.
The following process describes how ATG finds the language for each search configuration:
First, ATG checks the search configuration for a language specified as a dimension value for the search configuration itself or a parent search configuration folder.
If no language dimension is specified, ATG uses the language assigned to its base search configuration, if one exists. In order to associate a base search configuration with a search configuration, the configurations need not have identical languages (a base search configuration might accept any language, for example, or a search configuration might not have an explicit language), but they must not be conflicting.
If there is no associated base search configuration or if the base search configuration’s language is set to Any (not language specific), ATG uses the default language specified by your site administrator. If no default language is specified, the search engine’s default language is used.
One consequence to having an implicit language for each search configuration is that users may define rules without realizing how the implicit language influences their outcome. For example, a positioning rule that moves a set of products to the top of the results when a user searches on “Size Medium” is applied only when the language is English, because this term won’t locate any results using the French dictionary. If language isn’t a dimension in the search configuration, users may not think to create rules with words for each language their site supports.
