Customers who have ATG Search and ATG Merchandising can control the display of search results by creating a tree of search configurations and search configuration folders. Before you begin building your tree, you need to consider the search configurations you want it to contain as well as the order in which you want them to apply. It’s a good idea to develop a tree strategy first, based on a few key principles.
A tree is made up of search configurations organized by search configuration folders. A search configuration holds the set of rules that affect the ordering and contents of search results for a group of site visitors. When you create search configurations, it’s a good idea to create base search configurations first, which act as templates by providing settings that can be used or overridden in the search configurations they are associated with. A search configuration can associate any base search configuration with itself as long as it doesn’t support a conflicting language.
Depending on how you configure your tree, you can create a single search configuration for all visitors at your site, or create different search configurations for different groups of site visitors. Visitors can be grouped by language (useful if your site is in multiple languages or has visitors from multiple countries), by user segment (useful for targeting specific search results to specific types of visitors), or both. These groupings are called dimensions; language and user segments are the two types of dimensions provided by ATG Merchandising.
In addition to holding search configurations, search configuration folders specify dimensions, allowing you to filter out visitors who don’t meet restricted criteria. That way, the specialized visitors who do meet the criteria are more likely to see products tailored to their tastes.
All users, including merchandisers, can create search configurations and base search configurations, but it’s the task of an administrator to architect the search configuration tree by creating the search configuration folder structure that defines the tree and setting up the languages and user segments that will be available as dimension values.
