A production environment is a live Guided Search implementation that serves end-user search and navigation queries.

There are a variety of system architectures in a production environment. All of them typically use at least two servers and one load balancer. As system demand increases, the number of servers necessary in the implementation increases. Demand may take the form of time to crawl source data, frequent source data updates, faster query throughput, faster response time under increasing load, and so on. Several of the most common implementation architectures are described in the following sections.