<p>Is it possible to order results in SQL Server 2005 by the relevance of a freetext match? In MySQL you can use the (roughly equivalent) MATCH function in the ORDER BY section, but I haven't found any equivalence in SQL Server.</p>

<p>From the <a href="http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-natural-language.html" rel="noreferrer">MySQL docs</a>:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>For each row in the table, MATCH() returns a relevance value; that is, a similarity measure between the search string and the text in that row in the columns named in the MATCH() list.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>So for example you could order by the number of votes, then this relevance, and finally by a creation date. Is this something that can be done, or am I stuck with just returning the matching values and not having this ordering ability?</p>

[{'answer_id': 53540, 'author': 'Biri', 'author_id': 968, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/968', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': "<p>If you are using <code>FREETEXTTABLE</code> then it returns a column name <code>Rank</code>, so <code>order by Rank</code> should work. I don't know if other freetext search methods are also returning this value or not. You can have a try.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 58179, 'author': 'Josef', 'author_id': 5581, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5581', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Both <code>FREETEXTTABLE</code> and <code>CONTAINSTABLE</code> will return the <code>[RANK]</code> column, but make sure you are using either the correct variation or union both of them to get all appropriate results.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/53538', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1612/']