Changing the default 'sort by' setting for search

[john_mardlin (John)]

Is it possible to have the default search order be order:latest, either as a user preference or globally on an instance of Discourse?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Sorry for the delay… no this is not possible, but I could add a site setting for it.

I also usually prefer order:latest as a default for stuff I am searching for. Cause I like to use search to recall a topic I recently looked at.

Another option could be to give significantly more weight to recent stuff while leaving it as a “smart search” But… to be honest … maybe order:latest is simply a better default… @codinghorror?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I favor weighting recent stuff a bit more, personally. order:latest as a default would be awfully strong.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

It would be nice to have a simpler search shortcut for order:latest even a single character, as that is a lot to type plus a colon.

[alehandrof (Alex Armstrong)]

Both my users and myself find having to use the “latest post” to find what we need. We are probably a niche case because we have a lot of topics with the same keywords, so searching often good-naturedly surfaces old, but seemingly relevant topics. I’d appreciate the option to make “latest” the system default. It would help us a lot. I’m not suggesting it should be the default in general

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

There is already a one character shortcut to order by latest; just add “l” to your search and it will be ordered latest. So instead of searching for

hotdogs

search for

hotdogs l

[alehandrof (Alex Armstrong)]

I wasn’t aware of that shortcut. That’s helpful for me, though I already have an Alfred search that does what I need.

For my users though, it would be better to change the default behavior of the forum. It’s been requested a lot of times, and I’ve seen users use the forum over screen sharing as they try to find some piece of information tucked away in a post.

Again, I’m not suggesting this is a good practice for most forums, but because we have a lot of similarly named topics, it would help with retrieval.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@alehandrof

because we have a lot of similarly named topics, it would help with retrieval.

Google and other webcrawlers will struggle with this as well, I strongly suggest you should fix the root cause here and have more uniquely named topics.

[alehandrof (Alex Armstrong)]

@codinghorror

Google and other webcrawlers will struggle with this as well, I strongly suggest you should fix the root cause here and have more uniquely named topics.

We are a private community and don’t care about SEO. The root cause is have repeating events with the same title. For example, we have a lot of topics like this: “XYZ (October 2018”).

I understand that we’re a niche case. But it would be helpful to have the option for just such niche cases.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I think adding a site setting that allows you to pick default site sort order would be useful in some cases:

I agree with @codinghorror 100% that our default of “Relevance” is correct, but can see cases where there is a very strong preference for latest (either post or topic).

I am not keen on making this a strong per user setting quite yet though. @codinghorror should we slot adding this site setting, or wait on this for a bit?