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

[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.