Set the sort order

By default, search results are sorted by relevance. You can change the sort factor using OrderBy, ThenBy, OrderByDescending, or ThenByDescending.

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Note

Relevance is calculated by the Lucene search engine. It is based on several factors, such as: the number of hits in the document, and the location of the search terms in the document. To customize how relevance is calculated, see Boost search results with filters and Boost search results with weights.

Example

client.Search<Article>()
    .OrderBy(x => x.PublicationDate)
    .ThenBy(x => x.Author.Name)

Optimizely Search & Navigation supports sorting for numerical types such as int, double, DateTime, and string.

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Important

OrderBy must contain less than 50 characters.

Null values and SortMissing

By default, if a document has a null value in a field used to sort search results, it is sorted first when using the OrderBy and ThenBy methods, and last when using the OrderByDescending and ThenByDescending methods. You can change this behavior by supplying a second parameter of the SortMissing enum type.

client.Search<Article>()
    .OrderBy(x => x.PublicationDate, SortMissing.Last)
    .ThenByDescending(x => x.Author.Name, SortMissing.First)

Sort by geographical distance

The OrderBy and OrderByDescending methods have an overload for ordering by geographical distance for fields of type GeoLocation. See Geo Search.