By default, Optimizely Search & Navigation limits the number of returned documents to 10,000 for a single search, a maximum of 10 pages, with a maximum of 1,000 documents per page by default, which is the behavior of many search engines.

Similar to LINQ, the Optimizely Search & Navigation .NET API uses the following methods:

• Skip –  Bypass the number of search results.
• Take  – Specify how many search results should be returned. You can specify a value of up to 1000 using the Take method; Take(1001) or Take(int.MaxValue) throws an exception. If more than a thousand result items are needed, use multiple search requests.

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Note

You cannot combine Skip and Take to retrieve more than 10,000 hits in a single search. For performance reasons, Optimizely Search & Navigation is not intended for retrieving all content from the database in real-time, with deep pagination.

The following example uses the Skip and Take methods for pagination.

string searchQuery = //From query string or similar
int page = //From query string or similar
int pageSize = 15;

client.Search<BlogPost>()
    .For(searchQuery)
    .Skip((page - 1)*pageSize)
    .Take(pageSize)
    .GetResult();

Sometimes, visitors get duplicate hits on pagination because different shards answer the same query. Use the UsePreference method to prevent this from happening. By default, the UsePreference method does not use the PrimaryFirst option, so in rare cases, visitors may still get duplicate hits (although it has better performance). Using the UsePreference method with the PrimaryFirst option prevents duplicate hits completely, but sometimes, the query can be slower.

The following example shows the UsePreference method for pagination.

string searchQuery = //From query string or similar
int page = //From query string or similar
int pageSize = 15;

client.Search<BlogPost>()
    .UsePreference()
    .For(searchQuery)
    .Skip((page - 1)*pageSize)
    .Take(pageSize)
    .GetResult();