Changing the sort on Projects search does not reorder the results you already had. It runs a different search. Relevance, the sort the page opens on, uses semantic matching. Every other sort uses plain keyword matching. The two look at your words in different ways, so they return different projects, different totals, and sometimes almost no overlap.
Nothing has been lost. If a project disappeared when you switched the sort, switch back to Relevance and it will be there again.
What each engine matches
Relevance runs a combined keyword and meaning search. It can return a project whose title never contains your words, because the work is about the same thing. It ranks by how close the match is, which is why it has no direction to reverse.
Most Recent, Most Popular, Most Discussed, Top Rated and A-Z run a literal match. A project is a result only if your text appears inside its title, its description, or a team member's name. Those results are then sorted by the field you picked.
So a search for a concept will do better on Relevance, and a search for an exact title or an author will do better on the others.
The date filter stops working on Relevance
This is the trap worth knowing. The filter chips stay on screen whichever sort you choose, but they are not all read by both engines.
- Discipline, country, author and organization apply on every sort.
- Date is the one filter Relevance drops. On every other sort it applies normally. Switch to Relevance and your results quietly cover all time, while the date chip still sits above them saying otherwise.
If you need a date range, use any sort other than Relevance. If you want Relevance, take the date chip off so the results are not misleading.
Relevance plus a filter caps what it can find
When you combine a text query with any filter, Relevance takes its top 240 matches and applies the filter to those. The number of results it reports is how many of the 240 survived, not how many exist on UNI, and you cannot page beyond that window.
That is why a filtered Relevance search can report a smaller total than the same words under Most Recent. Both numbers are honest about what their engine looked at. If you want the complete set for a discipline or a country, switch to Most Recent, which counts everything it matched.
Filters with no search text always use keyword search
If you clear the search box and search on filters alone, the semantic engine has nothing to work with, so the page falls back to keyword search whatever the sort says. The date filter starts working again at that point, because the keyword engine is the one that honours it.
Results per page differ
Relevance loads 24 projects at a time. The other sorts load 12. This changes nothing about the results, but it does mean scrolling feels different after you switch.
If the search service is unavailable
Relevance quietly falls back to keyword search rather than showing an error. If a Relevance search suddenly looks literal and narrow, run it again in a minute.