Spotify Search API algorithm

[lbilder4]

Hello, I am a data science student and I am trying to analyze a dataset which consists of many different songs collected from Spotify using the Spotify Web API. The way these songs were collected is by using the Search API and searching by year. Spotify returns 2000 songs per year. However, I am not sure how these songs are ordered. Are they ranked explicitly by popularity, so that if I searched for songs in 2018 I would get the 2000 most popular songs in 2018, or are there other factors that contribute to the ordering? I was wondering if it would be possible to access the exact algorithm for how these results are returned? It will allow me to draw further conclusions from the dataset I am using.

Best,

Leo