From: "Sebastian Spaeth" <Sebastian@SSpaeth.de>
To: Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] allow to not sort the search results
In-Reply-To: <20100414065525.GA11770@jdc.jasonjgw.net>
References: <1271226655-5672-1-git-send-email-Sebastian@SSpaeth.de>
	<20100414065525.GA11770@jdc.jasonjgw.net>
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:51:11 +0200
Message-ID: <87hbnebhg0.fsf@SSpaeth.de>
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On 2010-04-14, Jason White wrote:
> > Also add a --sort=unsorted command line option to notmuch search to test this.
> 
> Does this provide relevance-ranked search results? I think relevance ranking
> is the Xapian default if a sort order isn't specified. 

Yes, by default it is using sort_by_relevance, so "unsorted" implies
just that. (in fact, a previous incarnation of this patch called it
--sort=relevance)

However, given that many of our terms, are boolean, relevance only
really comes into play when including terms within the body of a
message. (and *I* have not found the relevance sorting to be much useful
yet when I cared about some sort order, but that might just be me).
 
> It would be useful to be able to obtain a relevance-ranked list of messages or
> threads that satisfy a query.

I would be happy to have it called --sort=relevance too, the unsorted
points out potential performance improvements a bit better, IMHO
(although they seem to be really small with a warm cache).

Sebastian