How are search results sorted?

I've going through TC, mostly on my other account ibonewits, tweaking listings. I have a lot of information in the Private Comments field, which of course you can't see from TC, so I go back and forth a lot.

What I can't figure out is in what order the TC search results are sorted. If I search for, say, a tag, I can order the results in various ways on catalog view, but I can't seem to get the catalog view order from TC. The default order doesn't seem to be by title or anything else I can identify. Maybe order added?

At any rate, it's been kind of a pain, so if you can clue me in, I'd be grateful.

I'm in the process of exporting books from one account and moving them to the other, so there's a lot of tedious work going on.

I haven't figured out how the relevancy is calculated, but after a search you can change the sorting on the upper right under the Tinycat logo so you can switch it to title sorting if you prefer.

>1 PhaedraB: macsbrains is right. You can change the search sorting to the right of your search page in this drop-down menu:



Searches default by "Relevancy", which is calculated by the search secretly, behind closed doors. :) In all seriousness, perhaps miketopper can add more here (he primarily works with search), but that's the gist of it.

I'll have to take a screen shot. I kept sorting on title, but it wasn't lining up with the sort-by-title in my catalog view.

I guess I'll have to wait until I can reproduce it.

>4 PhaedraB: Maybe it's not taking the sort character into account so all the titles that start with "The" get sorted together?

>4 PhaedraB: Right, what jjwilson61 said. On LibraryThing, if you go to any of your books' edit pages, you should see a drop-down menu next to the title line. This is the menu to select your "sort character", where your title will start sorting from:

>6 kristilabrie:

But shouldn't that apply the same to TinyCat and LT proper? PhaedraB says she's seeing different sort orders for title sort for LT vs. TC.

It should, yes. If that's happening, it's a bug. We'll need a couple of specific searches/examples to look at it more closely!

>4 PhaedraB: Using my catalog in TC, choosing a tag, and sorting by title what I see is that it is sorting correctly using the sort character. So that's not the problem. Phaedra, we need to know what tag your using to select the books and what you see that's not in correct alphabetical order.

Yeah. I'm traveling, so only on LT sporadically for the next couple of weeks. As soon as I work on the TC again and see another example, I'll do a screen shot.

I know about the sort character number. On some entries, I've checked them several times! So I know it's not that.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

One note: The "acquisition" sort is based on entry date--when the book was added to the catalog. This is standard in library OPACs. Indeed, many older catalogs have no "relevancy" sort, so when you search for "Harry Potter" you get the most-recently added book with "Harry Potter" in it.

Anyway, it's just entry order. It is not using the "Date acquired" field from LT, and won't be.