Muddiest Point Week 10 For My Last Point of the Semester

We stated in lecture that search engines return data in a ranked order of similarity. Obviously there are algorithms that do this quickly. However, we also stated that this can be changed to return data ranked by anything such as authod, date, etc.... I guess what I'm muddy about is how the user goes about doing this in the search engine such as Google? Is there an option somewhere that lets you determine how articles are ranked and returned???