How to Sort Search Results by Relevance

Digicomply offers two distinct ways to interact with search data. You can either perform a precise, structured search (sorted by date) or a broader, keyword-based search (sorted by relevance). Understanding the difference is key to setting up effective monitoring feeds.

Search Relevancy in Digicomply

Non-Sorted Search (Filtered by Date)

This is the standard interaction when building a regulatory feed.

• How it works: You select specific tags from the dropdown menu (e.g., selecting the market United States or the product Chocolate from the suggestions).

• The Result: The system filters the database to show only documents that strictly match your criteria. Because the results are precise, they are ordered by Date (newest first) rather than relevance.

• Best Use: This is ideal for creating email alerts, as you only want to be notified of strictly relevant new documents.

The screen recording above shows the interaction using labels like product or market. As a user, you can also switch to a boolean search and further customize your terms.

With this approach, the results are sorted by their publishing date as you can see in the following screenshot:

Search Sorted by Relevance

This interaction is similar to using a standard web search engine (like Google).

• How it works: Type your keywords but do not select a specific tag from the dropdown list. Instead, simply press Enter or click the Search results button.

• The Result: The system returns a much larger set of documents (e.g., 100,000+). Instead of filtering content out, it ranks the results, placing the documents that best match your keywords at the top.

• Best Use: Use this for broad research to explore a topic. It is less useful for email feeds, as it may include loosely related content further down the list.

As you can see in the preview above, this approach returns more than 100 thousand results across all markets and sources.

With this search, results which mention challenges in chocolate will be put at the top of the results (see screenshot below). In this case, documents are not filtered but ordered.

• To narrow down the search results with more specific information you can combine the search criteria with the previous search method. You can do so by interacting with widgets. For example, looking only at content from the USA:

• Or using one of the suggested terms the system has proposed. 

As you can see, at the end, instead of 100,000 results, we ended up with 161 where each is sorted by how relevant they are to your query. 

Switching Sorting Modes

Regardless of how you started your search, you can manually change the order of the results at any time.

• Locate the Sort Menu: Look for the dropdown menu in the top-right corner of the results list (usually labeled "Sort by: Most recent" or "Relevance").

• Action: Click the dropdown to switch between different sorting modes depending on whether you need to see the newest updates or the best conceptual matches.