dsverisage

See line 3006 of wp-includes/query.php (In WP 4.5.1) for the relevant code:

// Order search results by relevance only when another "orderby" is not specified in the query.
		if ( ! empty( $q['s'] ) ) {
			$search_orderby = '';
			if ( ! empty( $q['search_orderby_title'] ) && ( empty( $q['orderby'] ) && ! $this->is_feed ) || ( isset( $q['orderby'] ) && 'relevance' === $q['orderby'] ) )
				$search_orderby = $this->parse_search_order( $q );

Marking as resolved

I found the answer. When WordPress does a search query, if an orderby is not specified, it adds this to the query

ORDER BY wp_posts.post_title LIKE '%yourterm%' DESC,

However, by default, ALM adds ‘date’ as the param to orderby, so wordpress does not try to sort by relevance on the title. I fixed my problem by changing my load more code to include a blank string for orderby:

echo do_shortcode('[ajax_load_more search="'.$search.'" offset="'.get_option('posts_per_page').'" orderby=""]');

Ahh ok. I saw those parameters but it said the default was 15 so I assumed they weren’t required to make that work, but adding them in worked.

Thanks!