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unlob

sort

stringdefault: relevance

Orders results by relevance, time, authority, quality, length or graph centrality.

Sorting by something other than relevance is how you ask a different question of the same result set. centrality gives you the canonical sources; published gives you the newest; host_rank gives you the most authoritative publishers.

All of these are stored fields, so sorting is free at query time.

Accepted values

  • relevance
  • recency
  • host_rank
  • quality
  • published
  • words
  • centrality

The live vocabulary is served by /describe — read it rather than hardcoding this list.

Example

sortbash
curl -H "x-api-key: $UNLOB_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.unlob.com/search?q=llm+evaluation&sort=centrality"

Common questions

What does the sort filter do?

Orders results by relevance, time, authority, quality, length or graph centrality.

When should I use sort?

Whenever "best match" is not the ordering your agent actually needs.

How does sort behave in practice?

All of these are stored fields, so sorting is free at query time.

Filters are free

Every filter is evaluated against a stored field, so it narrows the candidate set before scoring — a filtered query is often faster than an unfiltered one.