What is up with the search engine ?

Sorting by ratings, using for example, 5-stars only...

I get arcs with 59, 29, 19, 14 ratings... Eventually it drops to some arcs with 1 rating only.

Then I go to page 2, and again there's arcs with 6, 5, 4 ratings. Shouldn't these arcs be on page 1, before the arcs with only 1 rating ?

I think it goes by the rating of 5 stars then 4.9 stars and etc. Thats the only reason i can see.

That's what I heard too, but I've got a story arc with 3 5 star ratings that's way behind arcs with 1 5 star rating, so something else is going on here.

Is it sorted by Arc ID perhaps? Haven't checked it out myself however.

None of the above. My current theory is it indexes when the server goes down that established what page each arc should be on. Then while the server is up it sorts each page by the current number of votes. It does alphabetize ties on the same page. Next tie the server goes down, all the high number of vote arcs promote towards the front and then beging to drift based on most current numbers.

More to it than that, but that fits a lot of the observed behavior. Sprincle in people's arcs getting pulled for errors and you see some really weird juggling.