Finding sources worth following
Teams building recommendation, curation and discovery products.
The problem
- Discovery by keyword returns what matches the words, which is not the same as what is worth reading.
- Widening a result set usually means guessing at new queries, which reflects your vocabulary rather than the corpus's.
- Popularity signals favour recency and volume over substance.
The approach
- sort=centrality orders by position in the coverage graph — what the field references, rather than what matched the query.
- similar widens from a seed passage through the embedding space, crossing languages as it goes.
- related follows typed edges, so the expansion comes from documented relationships rather than similarity alone.
- Community filtering keeps discovery inside one discourse when a term means different things in different fields.
The parameters that matter
| Parameter | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
sort | centrality | Foundational rather than merely matching. |
similar?id= | a good seed | Widen without inventing a query. |
min_centrality | 0.3 | A floor on how well-connected results must be. |
community[] | one cluster | Stay inside a single discourse. |
curl -H "x-api-key: $UNLOB_API_KEY" \
"https://api.unlob.com/search?q=retrieval+evaluation&sort=centrality&limit=10"
curl -H "x-api-key: $UNLOB_API_KEY" "https://api.unlob.com/similar?id=p:8f2c9a&limit=10"Where this is not the right tool
- Centrality favours established sources, so it under-surfaces genuinely new material. Combine with prefer_recent when novelty matters.
- Community assignment is automatic and occasionally splits a field that a person would treat as one.
Frequently asked questions
How is centrality different from relevance?
Relevance asks what matches your query. Centrality asks what the corpus treats as load-bearing, independent of the query. For discovery the second is usually the better ordering.
Does similar work across languages?
Yes. The embedding space holds 101 languages, so a German seed passage can surface its English counterparts directly.
Build it on the free tier
10,000 requests a month, no card. Every parameter above works on every plan.