8. A non-transitory machine readable storage medium embodying information indicative of instructions for causing one or more machines to perform operations comprising: receiving an attribute for ranking query results; receiving query results from a query of a data source, each received query result having a respective numeric relevancy score relating to the query; for each received query result, concatenating with its relevancy score a segment of digits representing a value for the attribute corresponding to the query result to form numeric keys, such that the segment of digits is enabled as a score tie breaking factor among query results; and returning the query results ordered by the numeric keys, wherein the numeric keys take the form of a high segment of digits occupied by a relevancy score and a lower segment of digits representing the value for the attribute of the respective query result.
8. A non-transitory machine readable storage medium embodying information indicative of instructions for causing one or more machines to perform operations comprising: receiving an attribute for ranking query results; receiving query results from a query of a data source, each received query result having a respective numeric relevancy score relating to the query; for each received query result, concatenating with its relevancy score a segment of digits representing a value for the attribute corresponding to the query result to form numeric keys, such that the segment of digits is enabled as a score tie breaking factor among query results; and returning the query results ordered by the numeric keys, wherein the numeric keys take the form of a high segment of digits occupied by a relevancy score and a lower segment of digits representing the value for the attribute of the respective query result. 10. The non-transitory machine readable storage medium according to claim 8 , wherein the received attribute is a recency.