How do I make sure search results show most recent posts by default?

[c12gene (gene morris)]

Search feature, how do I default it to most recent posts first as opposed to oldest? Logically, this seems like this should be the default! Who wants posts from 3 years ago showing up in the top spot of the forum search results?

We have to get these posts from 3 years ago out of our search results. The content is no longer relevant and defeats the purpose of the search. The only relevant results in our forum are the most current posts.

What is the solution here?

[Lilly]

this post may help

Add site setting to default search results sort by latest post instead of relevance

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 thi…

also, this is why the default is relevance and not recent date:

Add site setting to default search results sort by latest post instead of relevance

If you have categories where the information ages out why not have your staff curate them, or set auto deletion? Sorting by latest also otherwise risks losing visibility of your most valuable content.

[Moin]

@c12gene

Who wants posts from 3 years ago showing up in the top spot of the forum search results?

Me! I don’t want to find all the support questions here at meta first. Many times the much older Documentation topic is a better source for information. If I want to search for something quite new I can choose a different order.

You already joined the feature topic. If you don’t want to wait untill someone works on that, you could hire someone at marketplace to implement this.