The new 1.8.3 documentation addresses my question, the behavior is as designed:
To sort or not to sort If you do not specify any sort options, your search results are automatically returned sorted by descending rank. There is no limit to the number of documents that are returned in this case. If you specify any sorting options, the sort is performed after all the matching documents have been selected. There is an explicit property, SortOptions.limit, that controls the size of the sort. You can never sort more than 10,000 docs, the default is 1,000. If there are more matching documents than the number specified by SortOptions.limit, search only retrieves, sorts, and returns that limited number. It selects the documents to sort from the list of all matching documents, which is in descending rank order. It is possible that a query may select more matching documents than you can sort. If you are using sort options and it is important to retrieve every matching document, you should try to insure that your query will return no more documents than you can sort. On Monday, March 4, 2013 9:38:57 AM UTC-6, Brent Yates wrote: > > When using the google app engine search API, if we have a query that > returns a large result set (>1000), and need to iterate using the cursor to > collect the entire result set, we are getting indeterminate results for the > documents returned if the number_found_accuracy is lower than our result > size. > > In other words, the same query ran twice, collecting all the documents via > cursors, does not return the same documents, UNLESS our > number_found_accuracy is higher than the result size (ex, using the 10000 > max). Only then do we always get the same documents. > > Our understanding of how the number_found_accuracy is supposed to work is > that it would only affect the number_found estimation. We assumed that if > you use the cursor to get all the results, you would be able to get the > same results as if you had run one large query. > > Are we mis-understanding the use of the number_found_accuracy or cursors, > or have we found a bug? > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
