TL:DR

• Ordering can only be set in the menu item so if you dont have a search menu item and only a search module there is no way to order the results
• Search hits in titles have no greater priority than search hits at the bottom of an article

Details

(copy pasted from a blog post on brian.teeman.net from last year)

It has bugged me for a long time that the search on my site is broken. I've never had the time to work out why but today I did so let me share it with you so that you can fix it on your site as well.
We all know that for google and other search engines the most important search term will be in your heading. So if you have two articles that match the search term the article with the search term in the title will appear first.

Now try to use the search module on my site for the search term replace.

If you scroll down and down and down you will find an article called "Search and Replace" at about position 18. That is the only article with the search term in the title so why is it so far down the search results?
I had assumed that this was a bug in the core Joomla code. That the search plugin was perhaps not looking in the title field or perhaps it was looking at the title field after the content field. But that turns out not to be the case.

foreach ($words as $word)
{
$word = $db->quote('%' . $db->escape($word, true) . '%', false);
$wheres2 = array();
$wheres2[] = 'LOWER(a.title) LIKE LOWER(' . $word . ')';
$wheres2[] = 'LOWER(a.introtext) LIKE LOWER(' . $word . ')';
$wheres2[] = 'LOWER(a.fulltext) LIKE LOWER(' . $word . ')';
$wheres2[] = 'LOWER(a.metakey) LIKE LOWER(' . $word . ')';
$wheres2[] = 'LOWER(a.metadesc) LIKE LOWER(' . $word . ')';
$wheres2[] = 'LOWER(fv.value) LIKE LOWER(' . $word . ')';
$wheres[] = implode(' OR ', $wheres2);
}

 
As you can see in the code above it is searching in the title and it is searching there for the search term before anywhere else.

So what was the problem?

Looking a ittle further down the content search plugin I saw this code.

switch ($ordering)
{
case 'oldest':
$order = 'a.created ASC';
break;
case 'popular':

$order = 'a.hits DESC';

break;
case 'alpha':

$order = 'a.title ASC';

break;
case 'category':

$order = 'c.title ASC, a.title ASC';

break;
case 'newest':

default:

$order = 'a.created DESC';

break;

}

So here you can see that by default the search results are ordered by the creation date of the article so that any article created yesterday will always display in the search results before an older article EVEN if the search term is in the title and therefore more important. That is exactly the problem I am facing. The "Search and Replace" article is quite old. But for me I think it still should display first as the term is in the title and so it is more important than an article where the term is six paragraphs in.

Setting the Sort Options

Now comes the interesting part. When I saw the code above I assumed that this meant there was a parameter in the plugin where I could set the default ordering to be used. So in my case I would change from the default "newest" to the "alpha" option and then I would have search working exactly the way that I want it to work. But guess what? There is no such option in the plugin at all.

Could this option really not be used at all? Surely not?

So if its not in the content-search plugin options it must be in the search module options. That would be the next most logical place for it to be wouldn't it. After all - there is no point in having the content-search plugin enabled if you dont have a search module on the site.

No joy here either - the module doesnt have any ordering options either. Wow - all this code in the plugin and it's just not used at all. Buit wait that can't be right can it. No one writes code that can never be used - that would just be stupid.

There is one last place that we can setup search on a joomla site. From a menu item. Perhaps it is there. Well it turns out that it is used - just not where I expected it to be and probably not somewhere you even have on your site. It's in the options for the search menu item.

Success?

So now my search results will be ordered how I expect them to be and the article with the search term in the title will be first on the search results? The non-developers amongst us would expect that wouldn't we? We have conducted a search and said to sort the results by title.

Well that is exactly what is happening - the results are being sorted alphabeticaly by title. Just not how I was expecting. the code says to sort the results by the order of the title. My article begins with the letter S so it is sorted near the end and not at the top - it actually moves up about one place on this site to about 17 but still way below where I was expecting it. Try it yourself here https://brian.teeman.net/search and set the ordering to Alphabetical.

I was expecting it sort the results by matches in the title and then by matches in the content. But that's not what the code says or does.

Failure

So how can I get Joomla to give me search results that follow established practices of making matches in the title more important? With the current code in the Joomla default search component it's just not possible. Even the hidden and hard to use options don't help you.