Search result order

[muzak]

My thoughts

Users have been clear about the benefits of changing search result order, not only since the pull request was closed, but even years prior.

The more (similar) notes people have, the more useful changing search result order to criteria like created or updated date becomes.

Not only can relevance can be the default order, but other search result sorting methods would help built-in search not fall further behind the search plugin (which is unfortunately only available on desktop).

Giving higher weight for more recent notes in the relevance algorithm is great, but "people usually wanting to sort by date" means they want a dedicated sort option to do so.

If the relevance algorithm is "a bit experimental" as the FAQ states, why not have non-experimental functionality to sort search results by multiple criteria (whether matching the above pull request or search plugin, or using a different approach)?

Review of search in existing apps

Evernote

The first post in this thread mentions that Evernote has sort by modified date.

Evernote has sort by updated date per this thread: Can't change order of search results?

@Fab6

That's a feature I used a lot with Evernote.. Let's say I want to find something I noted recently about "Wordpress", i just search for "Wordpress" then order by "more recent updated date first" and I can easily find my notes..

Notesnook

The Notesnook v3.0.23 post states:

Search results are now sorted by date created instead of relevance which was, to be frank, absolutely horrible. This change should make search results much more useful until we add support for sorting by other fields.

Joplin: Misleading functionality of the Detailed note list style

The post before this one recounts this bug when trying to sort search results in the detailed note list, which I can replicate:

@Fab6

2- it would even fix an existing UI bug, because right now we can click on the columns, and the "down/top" arrows move but the order of the results do not move.

Resolving this wouldn't improve the Compact note list style or Goto Anything. However, it would be a great start for this overarching issue.

Joplin: VS Code Style Search plugin

If this plugin could sort search results by date (on top of the other criteria I can sort results with), I would have even less need to use in-app search, albeit only on desktop.

Joplin: Sort notes by menu option

Search result order

In the View menu there is an option “Sort notes by” where you can choose to sort the list by updated date, created date, or title. However I see that search results don’t seem to obey this setting. Not sure if it’s a bug.

If notes are sortable in those ways, why shouldn't search results be sortable as such?

Other examples

Countless search engines, social media websites and apps, and other digital experiences with multiple ways to sort search results.

Even the Issues and Pull Request pages on the Joplin project's very own Github repositories have this feature (defaults to newest).

Even this very Discourse forum you are viewing right now has this feature (defaults to relevance).

Why can't the Joplin app have it too?

Pros and cons

I think this and similar threads make enough of a case for the pros for search result sort order.

Can someone else please present valid cons, whether for the feature itself or for any possible implementation?

If the closed pull request has tangible parts of its implementation that don't fit Joplin well, can those be described here to:

1. Determine if that is truly the case.
2. If so, work through it as capacity allows, instead of leaving it on the backburner indefinitely.