Disclosed here are methods, systems, paradigms and structures for spreading the interest of a user evenly over a predefined set of search results. A search engine retrieves search results from a database and perturbs at least a portion of the search results, that is, randomizes the order of the portion before presenting it to the user. In this way, even when a search is repeated between database update cycles, the user would see different top search results every time the search is executed. The perturbation technique can be applied to a search in a social networking system which searches for users. The perturbation can be done by randomizing the display order of the sear results based on a most recent activity time of the user. The perturbed search results will have different users every time the user performs a search. The perturbed search results are customized per user.