Have you seen the search prefer recent posts if you enable this and tune search_recent_posts_size to have about the number of posts you had in the last year it would prioritize these recent searches first.
We don’t have a site setting that forces a site into latest mode at the moment, I am not categorically against this being a site admin pref, but our usual way around it is simply to add the letter l to the end of searches to get this behavior.
Technically a theme component could achieve this kind of modification (by silently adding the l client side)