Want the book? Go get it!
This is the seventh episode in the series “SharePoint Search Queries Explained - The Series”. See the intro post for links to all episodes.In the “Rewrite and paraphrase” post I discussed the concepts of recall and precision which has to do with bringing back relevant items for a search query. When you have your golden set of items, the next step is to sort them in the best order possible to ensure the most relevant items are in your top hits or first page of results.
Tip: Increase the default number of items to display to 25 or 50. Ten items is not a lot and people are getting more and more used to scrolling these days.
There are four ways to sort a result in SharePoint:
- Sort the results based on a ranking profile
- You may also influence ranking by using the XRANK keyword (dynamic ordering)
- Sort the results based on a managed property ascending or descending
- Sort the results based on a sorting formula
- Sort the results randomly
- This is accommodated using a special sorting formula