The Search Merchandising feature enables Commerce sites to customize search results based on site initiatives and customer purchasing patterns. In ATG Merchandising, a merchandiser creates search configurations, which are sets of rules that determine the order of search results and which items are excluded from the results. These search configurations are stored in the RefinementRepository (along with the refinement configurations used for Faceted Search), and are submitted to ATG Search when the product catalog is indexed. When a site visitor issues a search query, ATG platform components determine which search configuration to use, and include this information with the query. When ATG Search returns the results from the query, it applies the rules in the search configuration to those results.
This chapter describes the client-side services involved in Search Merchandising. It includes the following sections:
