Order web search results

This page explains how to order the results of a web search query by date.

For data stores that use basic website search, you can order by Google-inferred page dates.
For data stores that use advanced website indexing, you can order by custom data attributes or Google-inferred page dates that are added to the data store schema. For more information, see Use structured data for advanced website indexing.

Before you begin

Make sure that you do the following:

Create a data store with website data. For more information, see Website URLs.
Create a search app and connect it to the data store. For more information, see Create a search app.

Order search results for basic website search

To order the search results for a website data store with basic website search, follow these steps:

REST

The following sample shows how to to order your web search results for an app with basic website search. This sample uses the engines.servingConfigs.search method:

Note: You can search over an app using the engines.servingConfigs.search method and you can search over a data store using the dataStores.servingConfigs.search method. For the following procedure, Google recommends searching using the engines.servingConfigs.search method.

Find your app ID. If you already have your app ID, skip to the next step.
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Agent Builder page.
  
  Go to Apps
2. On the Apps page, find the name of your app and get the app's ID from the ID column.
Make a search query and include the orderBy field.

Key Term: In Vertex AI Search, the term app can be used interchangeably with the term engine in the context of APIs.
```
curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
"https://discoveryengine.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/collections/default_collection/engines/APP_ID/servingConfigs/default_search:search" \
-d '{
"servingConfig": "projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/collections/default_collection/engines/APP_ID/servingConfigs/default_search",
"query": "QUERY",
"orderBy": "ORDER_BY"
}'
```
Replace the following:
- PROJECT_ID: the ID of your Google Cloud project.
- APP_ID: the ID of the Vertex AI Search app.
- QUERY: the query text to search.
- ORDER_BY: the order in which the results are arranged. For example, to order chronologically, specify date to return web pages sorted by Google-inferred page date. For more information on the Google-inferred page date, see the Help Google Search know the best date for your web page blog post. The default sort order is descending, in which the pages with the most recent dates are returned first. To get ascending sort order, append :a to the date value—date:a.

Order search results for advanced website indexing

To order the search results for a website data store with advanced website indexing, follow these steps:

REST

The following sample shows how to order your web search results for an app with advanced website indexing. This sample uses the engines.servingConfigs.search method:

Find your app ID. If you already have your app ID, skip to the next step.
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Agent Builder page.
  
  Go to Apps
2. On the Apps page, find the name of your app and get the app's ID from the ID column.
Make a search query and include the orderBy field.

Key Term: In Vertex AI Search, the term app can be used interchangeably with the term engine in the context of APIs.
```
curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
"https://discoveryengine.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/collections/default_collection/engines/APP_ID/servingConfigs/default_search:search" \
-d '{
"servingConfig": "projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/collections/default_collection/engines/APP_ID/servingConfigs/default_search",
"query": "QUERY",
"orderBy": "ORDER_BY"
}'
```
Replace the following:
- PROJECT_ID: the ID of your Google Cloud project.
- APP_ID: the ID of the Vertex AI Search app.
- QUERY: the query text to search.
- ORDER_BY: the order in which the results are arranged. The field can have values that are of the following data types: datetime, integer, or number. To order chronologically, specify the custom date attribute specified in the schema or the Google-inferred page date to return web pages sorted by date. For example, to order by a date_edited PageMap attribute, you can specify the orderBy field as "orderBy": "date_edited". The default sort order is ascending, in which older pages are returned first. To get the results in descending order, append desc to the custom attribute value—for example, "orderBy":"date_edited desc".