To help customers find the product data that they are looking for, you can create groups of product features known as facets or dimensions. A dimension typically represents a broad category of product data. Dimensions contain one or more dimension values, which represent more specific aspects of product data. For example, a dimension might represent product brand names generally, while each dimension value within that dimension might represent a particular brand name.
Dimensions can help customers find information about particular products in the following ways:
through Guided Navigation, customers can select dimensions and dimension values to refine their search. For example, customers can select the dimension representing product brand names, which contains dimension values representing different brands. Customers can then select dimension values to limit their search to particular brands.
through a record search, which returns records tagged to dimension values that match the search term that the customer enters. The dimension values must belong to dimensions that are part of the search interface that your Guided Search application is using.
through dimension searches, which return dimension values (but not records) that belong to dimensions that are specified in a query and that match the search term entered by the customer.
You can create two different types of dimensions: flat dimensions and hierarchical dimensions. These dimensions differ in the way that dimension values are organized within them.