how to make a pagination where the link options are the number of items you want to show

The paginate() method takes a parameter for the number of entries to show per page. Given that, you could just have a drop down form that has 5, 10, 20, etc as values and use that value to get the number of entries.

<select name="perPage">
    <option value="5">5</option>
    <option value="10">10</option>
</select>

$perPage = $request->input('perPage', 10);

$users = App\User::paginate($perPage);

The above will use the value from perPage, or default to 10 if not present.

my tutorial

http://novate.co.uk/allow-user-to-choose-pagination-length-via-dropdown-laravel/

hello @snapey it worked! but i was wondering if i could make the search results not show up in the url https://www.mywebsite.com/records?page=1&items=2 to be this https://www.mywebsite.com/records

no, since this is a Get request, all parameters must be in the url