Oracle ATG Web Commerce Search can accept several different types of search input. Two common types are:
Text—The user enters one or more terms and clicks a submit button.
Browse—The user clicks a link that contains search request information encoded in a URL. This information could include a product category.
The examples in this chapter use text searches.
The search form handlers can also add parameters to the user input, for example to identify the language the user is searching in, or to restrict the search to certain parts of the index. Most of this guide addresses this subject, but see the Search Form Handlers chapter to get started.
The text the user enters is packaged up into a query request. The request is a Java object that is sent to Search when the user clicks a submit button, follows a link, etc. The request is then translated into XML for processing by the search engine.
