Is custom sorting on search not supported?

The Custom sort seems to only sort the results.

I have 10,000 documents indexed and I search with a limit of 10 and those 10 are now sorted according to popularity. I’m doing:

const indexResults = this.index.search({
  query: q,
  field: "title",
  limit: 10,
  sort: (a, b) => b.popularity - a.popularity,
  suggest: true
});

But it still seems to sort on “matchness” (or “relevance”) and NOT on my popularity.

What I want, when I type wa that the document that contains a wa anywhere and has the highest popularity should appear first. If there are, 10,000 documents and 1,000 that technically match wa I want those 1,000 to be sorted by popularity.

(PS. I tried using sort: "popularity" but that sorted the results the wrong direction and doing sort: "-popularity" didn’t work)

[peterbe]

Actually. I tried that. It works really well! Here’s what I did:

-    Object.entries(titles).forEach(([uri, title]) => {
-      this.index.add(uri, title);
-    });
+    Object.entries(titles)
+      .sort((a, b) => b[1].popularity - a[1].popularity)
+      .forEach(([uri, info]) => {
+        this.index.add(uri, info.title);
+      });

Doing a couple of searches this way seems to produce pretty good results. At least good enough that I’m no longer blocked and can continue to use FlexSearch.

[ts-thomas]

Yeah nice idea. It works when the results have the same relevance. If not the relevance gets prioritize over the sort. But you can control relevance. Relevance isn’t a float value, it is an integer. You can control the “resolution” of how many different relevance values exist (“slots”). This way you can force to sort by an external value regardless of the relevance:

new FlexSearch({
    threshold: 0,
    resolution: 1
});

This will categorize each text to the same relevance “slot”.