Search is essential for constraint programming. Search engines typically combine several features like state restoration for backtracking, best solution search, parallelism, or visualization. In current implementations like Mozart, however, these search engines are monolithic and hard-wired to one exploration strategy, severely complicating the implementation of new exploration strategies and preventing their reuse. This paper presents the design of a search factory for Mozart, a program that enables the user to freely combine several orthogonal aspects of search, resulting in a search engine tailored to the user's needs. The abstractions developed here support fully automatic recomputation with last alternative optimization. They present a clean interface, making the implementation of new exploration strategies simple. Conservative extensions of the abstractions are presented that support best solution search and parallel search as orthogonal modules. IOzSeF, the Interactive Oz Search Factory, implements these abstractions and is freely available for download.
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