SP 2010 - Randomize the order of your search results from FullTextSqlQuery

I had a need recently to perform a query with FullTextSqlQuery but to limit the results and then display them in a random order. The FullTextSqlQuery class does support a RowLimit property, though this would not work in my case because I didn't want to get the exact same answers everytime.

Remembering that LINQ to SharePoint often requires Two-Stage Queries, I decided to employ a similar approach here and pull back the data I could then perform more culling server side.

DataTable searchResults = PerformSearch(query, queryRowLimit);
if (searchResults != null && searchResults.Rows.Count > 0)
{
 int limit = 10; //todo: this should be a webpart property
 var results = (from row in searchResults.AsEnumerable()
       orderby Guid.NewGuid()
       select row).Take(limit);
}

The PerformSearch method is just a standard setup for using FullTextSqlQuery to return a DataTable. Note that I limit my resultset as much as I can with the FullTextSqlQuery.QueryText property to try to avoid hitting a throttling exception.

With the limited results returned, I then want to randomize the order of the records. LINQ allows us to do this the same way we would in SQL, and I just order by a random Guid. Once the results are randomized, we just grab the number of records we need with the Take() extension method.