Search results are sorted by the relevancy of each document to the search query/text provided - best matching entries should be returned on top / first page. Unfortunately, there is no way to change it in Infinity 8.8 unless you are willing to re-sort documents in memory, however, this means that you will be sorting only those documents which has been already identified as best matches within your pagination setting constraints.
In Infinity '23 we introduced a new setting on Search API which can be used to change sorting and instead of relevancy, use selected properties. It is possible to change default (or custom) Search Gadget logic to use that feature and sort results by any of the indexable properties which are part of the search configuration