Default search rankings to Relevance for bills and testimonies - #2241
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The default was "Sort by Most Recent Testimony", a pure recency sort in which text relevance plays no part. A query like "liquor" expands through the legislative synonym set to "alcohol" and matches hundreds of bills in their full text, and under that sort the page led with whichever weak body-text match had the newest testimony: the budget, a tax-cap bill, a tenant bill. Relevance is now the first option and the default. Its index name is the bare "bills" collection rather than "bills/sort/<sort_by>", and BillSearch pins billsRelevanceSort as the adapter's sort_by: the adapter falls back to that whenever the index name has no sort segment. That keeps the _eval clause out of every Browse Bills URL, which is keyed by index name, so a default page reads bills[query]=liquor. The other options keep their sort in the index name and override the pinned one as before. The eval-shared billsSearchParams is unchanged, so the harness sends exactly what it did. The default index name lives next to the sort options, and BillSearch and billSearchByTopicLink both key on it instead of a hard-coded string; the topic links previously carried the old latestTestimonyAt key and would otherwise have landed on the page with no refinements. billsRelevanceSort itself is unchanged and the bills golden set scores byte-identical to the bills-order-demotion baseline. The empty-query landing page now orders non-procedural bills by testimony count, the sort's tiebreaker. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QeZFi8CjMyJixcm5CbGUzq
Same change as for bills, same mechanism. Relevance is the first option and the default, keyed on the bare "publishedTestimony" collection with testimonyRelevanceSort pinned as the adapter's sort_by, so the sort string stays out of the page's URLs. Newest and Oldest keep their sort in the index name and override it as before. The landing page does not change: with no query every document's text match is equal, so the relevance sort falls through to its publishedAt tiebreak and reads newest-first exactly as the old default did. With a query, weak matches no longer win on date alone. Hearings keep their date-windowed default, since "past, newest first" is a view with a time filter rather than a sort. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QeZFi8CjMyJixcm5CbGUzq
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September 10, 2026 21:24
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Summary
"Sort by relevance" used to be undefined & a TypeScript default, but ever since #2227, it's actually defined for bills, hearings, and testimonies. It weighs based on the score of the hit & then tiebreaks by recency for testimonies & recency of last testimony for bills. This switches the default ordering to be relevance for testimonies & bills (hearings are untouched as a chronological sort makes more sense for hearings).
Checklist
firestore.indexes.json(Please do not only create indexes through the Firebase Web UI, even though the error messages may reccommend it - indexes created this way may be obliterated by subsequent deploys)Screenshots
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