Built-in ranking rules

There are two types of ranking rules in Meilisearch: built-in ranking rules and custom ranking rules. This article describes the main aspects of using and configuring custom ranking rules.

Built-in ranking rules are the core of Meilisearch's relevancy calculations.

Meilisearch contains six built-in ranking rules in the following order:

[
  "words",
  "typo",
  "proximity",
  "attribute",
  "sort",
  "exactness"
]

Depending on your needs, you might want to change this order. To do so, use the update settings endpoint or update ranking rules endpoint.

Results are sorted by decreasing number of matched query terms. Returns documents that contain all query terms first.

Results are sorted by increasing number of typos. Returns documents that match query terms with fewer typos first.

Results are sorted by increasing distance between matched query terms. Returns documents where query terms occur close together and in the same order as the query string first.

It is possible to lower the precision of this ranking rule. This may significantly improve indexing performance. In a minority of use cases, lowering precision may also lead to lower search relevancy for queries using multiple search terms.

Results are sorted according to the attribute ranking order. Returns documents that contain query terms in more important attributes first.

Also, note the documents with attributes containing the query words at the beginning of the attribute will be considered more relevant than documents containing the query words at the end of the attributes.

Results are sorted according to parameters decided at query time. When the sort ranking rule is in a higher position, sorting is exhaustive: results will be less relevant but follow the user-defined sorting order more closely. When sort is in a lower position, sorting is relevant: results will be very relevant but might not always follow the order defined by the user.

Results are sorted by the similarity of the matched words with the query words. Returns documents that contain exactly the same terms as the ones queried first.