The Search Test environment designates a set of one or more machines as being responsible for one of the following tasks:

Before you run Search tests, you must identify the Search environments that contain the products, SKUs, search configurations, facets, and other search settings you want to test.

Choose the Search Testing environment that best suits the type of test you want to run. To see instructions for creating a test and choosing a Search Testing environment, see Creating a Search Test.

The Merchandising administrator configures which environments are available for Search Testing and, if there is more than one, which one to use as the default.

Undeployed or Deployed Facets and Search Configurations

You can use Search Testing to test:

If you are working in the context of a project, the search test environment includes your undeployed changes by default, but you can change this before you run the test. If you are browsing outside of a project, you can only test deployed facets and search configurations.

You do not need to re-index to test undeployed facets and search configurations. You do, however, have to deploy and index other assets, such as catalog items and price lists, to include them in a search test. If you create a new parent category in your project, for example, and run a search test with the new category as one of your search criteria, you will get an empty result set, even if the category contains indexed products or SKUs. This occurs because the search engine does not recognize the category.

Search tests do, however, take into account undeployed changes that affect category facets and the search configuration tree. Continuing with the example from the previous paragraph, if your new category encompasses existing categories, you could add a facet to the new category and test it by selecting an indexed sub-category that inherits the facet.

To test undeployed facets and search configurations, Merchandising creates a temporary file that contains the undeployed definitions and sends it to the search engine along with the query. The search engine then applies those temporary facets and search configurations to the deployed data in the search index to generate the search results.

If you recently deployed your updated search configurations or facets, an indexing job must be run to update the post-index customizations file before you can test the newly deployed changes. For more information, see the ATG Search Administration Guide.