The ability to search for products and SKUs is an essential feature of almost every commerce site. Searching enables customers to quickly track down specific items without having to navigate through the site’s category structure. More sophisticated search techniques can be used to find products based on criteria such as price, color, or manufacturer.
Search in ATG Store is implemented through integration with ATG Search. ATG Search supports a number of advanced search techniques, including natural language queries, faceted navigation, and the ability to tailor results to individual users (search merchandising).
If ATG Search is not present, ATG Store determines this and falls back to using your database system’s own search facility. In this case, search queries are limited to keywords and simple search strings, and facets and search merchandising are not available.
ATG Store determines if ATG Search is available based on the value of the atgSearchInstalled property of the /atg/store/StoreConfiguration component. By default, this property is set to false, meaning ATG Search is not available. The Store.Search.Query module sets the value of this property to true.
This chapter includes the following topics:
