One of the problems the Google team was trying to solve was that the website owners what website owners received when they chose to download the 100,000 backlink list on their websites using "Download more sample links" button. For some websites that data did not provide a clear overview of link health for a website as the results tended to rank links in alphabetical order. One of the big improvements Google recently made was to change the way links are sampled making them more uniform from the full spectrum of backlinks rather than alphabetically.
This change was inspired by feedback from the webmaster community, as many site owners were frustrated by the limited profile of a website's backlink health. The update will offer a much broader, more diverse cross-section of links. This will help website owners and marketing teams understand:
The maximum number of links that Google Webmaster Tools will allow for export is still about 100,000 backlinks. Many users lobbying for Google to increase the number, but instead Google decided to focus on the sampling offered.