Searching means retrieving stored information using an input query. Commonly, the information is textual and the queries are words or phrases entered by an end-user. The search results are typically documents relevant to the query, plus an indication of why the documents were retrieved. In order for searching to be efficient, the document collection is indexed by its sentences and terms in a secondary storage component, called the index.
ATG Search generalizes documents and other content into an abstraction called an content item. A content item consists of two main parts: searchable text content and metadata. Metadata includes the title, summary, and other associated properties. Examples of content items are products in a Commerce repository, HTML files, or structured data from a traditional database.
The content items are fed into ATG Search, which analyzes the content and stores a representation for each item in the index; these objects are organized into document sets. ATG Search creates some sets from the physical directory of the item, some sets from the metadata of the item, and other sets from categorization results. These sets enable users to search within subsets of the collection and to browse the collection without query input.
Text content is processed through components that identify structural elements (such as sentences, headers, and tables) as well as terms in the content. This processing is driven by a dictionary and other language data, which are also stored in the index.
In ATG Search, end-user text queries are embedded by the client application within complexrequests. A request may include parameters, processing options, constraints, security settings, and other information. The two primary requests are the Search Query and the View Item request. ATG Search returns responses that contain varied information depending on the type of request. For a Search Query, the response contains a list of results plus other information to drive the search application or user interface.
For more information on ATG Search query and response types, see the ATG Search Query Reference Guide.
