Users can use the Sort By drop-down list on the search results page to sort results by object type or by folder location in the Knowledge Directory or Administrative Objects Directory. You can customize this drop-down list to include additional categories relevant for your users. For example, if you use a property in your portal documents named Region, you can customize the Sort By drop-down list to include Sort By Region: New England, Midwest, and so forth.

The first issue to consider when assessing whether categorizing search results by a particular property is a good idea is whether the property will be defined for a substantial percentage of all search results. For instance, if 90% of search results do not have the property defined, then when categorizing by that property, most everything will fall under “All Others”, and the categorization will not be very useful. For that reason, as a rule of thumb it is not generally recommended to add a custom categorization option for a property which is undefined for more than half of all documents and administrative objects.

The other issue to consider is whether the values for the property will make reasonable category titles. In order for categorization to work well for a property, each value should be a single word or a short noun phrase, for example, New England, Midwest, Product Management, Food and Drug Administration, and so forth. The values should not be full sentences or long lists of keywords, for example, “This content crawler crawls the New York Times finance section”. The entire contents of the property value for each item will be considered as a single unit for the purposes of categorization, so it will look odd if a full sentence is returned as a category title.

The first step in the process of adding a new categorization option is to ensure that documents and objects include the property you want to use to sort by category. See Mapping Source Document Attributes to Portal Properties Using the Global Document Property Map and Associating Properties with Portal Objects Using the Global Object Property Map.