Follow up… I tried the “search prefer recent post” and it does help because it is bringing up more recent posts but unfortunately it does not list the posts in chronological order so it is a little confusing when looking at the results. Adding “l” to the end of the search criteria seems to give me the same results as if I chose “Latest” but it still says “Relevance” in the “Sort by” pull down menu so it’s a little confusing or misleading to the user because the results not by relevance and it would seem that adding the character makes it impossible for the user to actually search by relevance. All these suggestions are definitely helpful and I very much appreciate you folks taking the time to address my needs. If you end up adding the pref to default to other search options please let us know 
Understand there is a concern that
Sorting by latest also otherwise risks losing visibility of your most valuable content
but it is a risk I am willing to assume based on the nature of my content and the needs of my users. Finally, I want to thank you guys again for an amazing product. I love Discourse.