Sorting
Sorting by something other than relevance asks a different question of the same result set — and every sort field is stored, so it is free.
The seven orders
relevance is the default and uses the mode's scoring. recency orders by crawl time, published by content date. host_rank puts the most authoritative publishers first, quality the best-formed passages. words orders by length. centrality orders by position in the coverage graph.
When centrality beats relevance
Relevance answers "what matches my words". Centrality answers "what does this field treat as foundational". For an agent entering an unfamiliar domain the second is usually the more useful ordering — it surfaces what a domain expert would have read first rather than what happened to match the query string.
curl -H "x-api-key: $UNLOB_API_KEY" \
"https://api.unlob.com/search?q=llm+evaluation&sort=centrality&limit=10"Soft preferences instead
A hard sort discards the ranking signal entirely, which is sometimes too blunt. prefer_recent and prefer_authority bias the ranking without abandoning relevance — the right tool when newer or more authoritative is better but not required.
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