If you have many search results, as windchill works now, the displayed result table is sorted after the search limit is reached. This means that only the first 2000 elements are sorted, instead of displaying the first sorted 2000 elements. The side effect is that you might expect elements in the list, that are now are only in one of the next set of search results.
therefore Windchill should allow you to indicate the attribute on which the searchresults must be sorted on, or the search must take the default sort column of the view that is going to be used as sort attribute for the search result.
https://support.ptc.com/apps/case_logger_viewer/auth/ssl/case=13653398
