does Typesense have some built-in default "sort by updated at"? once I update a document, it goes "to the top" in the search results (Instant Search) .. I haven't really investigated, thought I'd ask here first.

No we don't have a last updated field. You will have to an explicit field and update it.

I'm saying that I'm seeing this behaviour already and I wonder why.

The default sorting order is based on internal document ID which gets auto incremented on new records. But it won't be affected by updates.

It's a Laravel app and I'm using the official Laravel package for typesense. Maybe that has some default sorting added, that's using Laravels "updated_at" field... I'm not sure. I'll investigate further.

Yes, without a

sort_by

the records are sorted by the internal ID. Which means records that are created last will appear first since they have a greater ID. However, this will certainly not be the case for a record updated. One experiment you can do is this: can you update the record with ID 75124 (appearing first in the screenshot) and see if the records are still sorted in the same order?

@Kishore Nallan please take a look at the screenshot, you can see the autoincremented IDs and created_at and updated_at timestamps. As soon as I update a document it goes to the top of the result list. You can see the updated_at timestamps in the screenshot. There is only one search request to the multi_search endpoint (I guess it's InstantSearch using multi_search as the endpoint).

@Jason Bosco any thoughts?

This line suggests to me that it’s sorted by IDs within the Laravel Typesense engine: https://github.com/typesense/laravel-scout-typesense-engine/blob/55efffa62e063f5db092917f124c941a88943452/src/Engines/TypesenseSearchEngine.php#L174

@Jason Bosco Laravel is only applicable when inserting/updating documents. Fetching the data is done with InstantSearch, so it's not going through Laravel, but directly to Typesense.

@em1nos Could you do the following with curl, to isolate what might be going on: 1. Do a multi-search query (you could just copy-as-curl the request made by your app) and run it in your terminal 2. Now using curl, update a record 3. Run the same multi-search query in 1) again via curl and see if the order has now changed

ok, let me try that

Ah I think this might be it: The package deletes the previous record and then adds it as a new record: https://github.com/typesense/laravel-scout-typesense-engine/blob/55efffa62e063f5db092917f124c941a88943452/src/Engines/TypesenseSearchEngine.php#L43-L53

oh .... I have a feeling this Laravel package is "jank" in more than a few places ...

I think this portion might have been written before we supported upserts.

ok, so I could just add whatever default sort_by to mitigate this?

Yeah that, or a PR to use upsert instead of delete+import in the code block above 🙂 🙏

I would love to, but it's too advanced for me .. I can barely understand what's going on in the current code

Could you open a github issue about this? May be @Abdullah Al-Faqeir or @hi019 can take a look