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

📘

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 [Boosting with filters](🔗) and [Boosting with weights](🔗).

**Example**

Sorting is supported for numerical types such as int, double, DateTime, and string.

## 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.

## Sort by geographical distance

The `OrderBy` and `OrderByDescending` methods have an overload for ordering by geographical distance for fields of type `GeoLocation`. For more information, see [Geo Search](🔗).