Before you deploy your Guided Search application in a production environment, you must define various aspects of the structure and behavior of its components. The definitions of these aspects, taken together, are known as the application's configuration. Identifying sources of product data, creating logical structures to organize that data, and specifying how your web page users can search that data for the information that they need, are some of the important aspects of configuration.

The following diagram illustrates the components of a Guided Search application. (The components that you are responsible for creating are shown in shaded boxes.)

The different components of a Guided Search application require different amounts and types of configuration, as summarized in the following section.