We need to not just give patrons the option for other sorting approaches, but we need to have the sort default be able to be changed by us so the patron doesn't have to figure out that they need to change the sort to get better results.

Yes, Margaret sums up the issue very nicely! For us, the Most Popular sort addresses this issue by surfacing the mainstream items that most people are mostly likely to be searching for.

When we do a search for Harry Potter, it is until the 72nd result (!) that a book in the series in English comes up. There are all sorts of other books, media, and books in the series in other languages, which are considered more 'relevant' by the current search algorithm. Not ideal. This happens with other titles too (e.g. Lessons in Chemistry) where other languages come up before English. We need to not just give patrons the option for other sorting approaches, but we need to have the sort default be able to be changed by us so the patron doesn't have to figure out that they need to change the sort to get better results.

Polaris PAC allows you to set your default sort order, and ours is set to Most Popular. Therefore, it's actually MORE confusing for our patrons who might do a search in our PAC and then get different results if they do the same search in our app. My goal is to provide a consistent user experience across all our library channels.

Ideally, the app would inherit configurations such as this from the PAC. Alternatively, it would be nice for the same configurations to be available in the app as are in the PAC.