The discussion revolves around enhancing search functionality in Discourse by allowing administrators to set a default ‘sort by’ option for searches. ixeft requests this feature, noting that users often need to manually switch to ‘recent message’ to find relevant results. codinghorror suggests using the shortcut ‘l’ (e.g., ‘apples l’) to force sorting by latest posts, though pfaffman finds it doesn’t work with tag-only searches like ‘howto l’. codinghorror clarifies that a search term is required, and browsing categories should be done directly. TallTrees, commenting on an old thread, asks whether the existing ‘search prefer recent posts’ setting helps, or if it’s only for performance. They explain that on their 5+ year-old local issues forum, default ‘relevance’ sorting often surfaces outdated topics, which can mislead users. They propose either a slider to weight recency negatively in relevance or, as a simpler fix, a default sort option — potentially implementable via a theme component if not in core. codinghorror reiterates the ‘l’ shortcut as the current workaround for latest-first sorting.
Hello,
Most of our users a complaining of not finding the right topics when searching, and myself I most of the time change the sort by option to «recent message» to find what I want.
Can it be possible to add to the admin panel an options to choose which is the search sortby option by default ?
Regards,
Add the search term “l” (lowercase L) to quickly force that sort. Like so:
apples l
Perhaps I don’t understand. This doesn’t work here with “howto l”. Should that give me the items in that tag sorted by latest tag?
Try adding an actual search term, if you want to browse a category visit the category.
I know this is a really old topic, but does the “search prefer recent posts” setting go someway to achieve this? Or is that purely as a speed optimisation?
The situation I am in is that the forum I run is 5+ years old. Content is about local issues and events. The default search ordering by ‘relevance’ often turns up old topics, encouraging them to be resurrected, rather than pointing at (possibly shorter) newer topics which are more useful and relevant to current discussion.
I guess ideally there would be a slider where relevance can be set to take age as a negative weighting, so that newer topics can be favoured to some extend - in a forum about local issues, newer is often more relevant.
However, an option to set the default search order would also be a good start. Perhaps a theme component could be made to do this if no core setting exists?
Add the “l” search shortcut for latest.
Searching for “orange” and “orange l” will give you the latest posts first in the latter case.
Closed to focus the discussion in Add site setting to default search results sort by latest post instead of relevance