<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>

If you are using
```
FREETEXTTABLE
```
then it returns a column name
```
Rank
```
, so
```
order by Rank
```
should work. I don't know if other freetext search methods are also returning this value or not. You can have a try.