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 Commerce Reference Store is implemented through integration with Oracle ATG Web Commerce Search. 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 Search is not present, Commerce Reference Store determines this and falls back to using ATG’s basic search facility. In this case, search queries are limited to keywords and simple search strings, and facets and search merchandising are not available.

Commerce Reference Store determines if 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 Search is not available. The Store.Search.Query module sets the value of this property to true.

This chapter includes the following topics: