The discussion revolves around an issue with search results when using the combination of “in:first” and “order:latest” on the Weird sort order when search topics/posts with “in:first” and “order:latest” combination thread. jesus2099 initially reported that the results were not sorted by the latest post as expected. Moin pointed out that the issue is caused by the “in:first” filter, which prioritizes the creation date of the first post over the latest activity. jesus2099 acknowledged this and updated the topic title. JammyDodger suggested that this behavior is not a bug but rather the expected result of using “in:first” with the latest filter. However, jesus2099 countered that it would be more intuitive for the results to be ordered by the latest activity, especially in a topic search result list. A potential workaround is to use the “by relevance” option, which produces the desired results.
When I search for topics and posts, with the Sort by Latest Post option, I see that the order is not at all sorted by latest post.
MASS MERGE RECORDINGS and MERGE HELPOR 2 are the last updated topics (19h), and they should have come first in the list.
They actually come first when using Sort by Relevance.
I will try to reproduce on meta or test.
I think it’s because you search in:first. The post you get as a result is not 19h old, it seems to be from 2017.
But I understand your problem. If searching in:first there is no difference between sort by latest post and sort by latest topic.
https://meta.discourse.org/search?q=%40Discourse%20%23howto%20in%3Afirst%20order%3Alatest
Is an example here at meta.
The result shown last (Configure Facebook login for Discourse) has newer latest posts than the first result
Thank you @Moin, you found the cause!
I have updated the topic title.
Using the default Sort by Relevance seems like a nice workaround, anyway.
I don’t think this is a bug? If you use the in:first filter by latest it will give you the results of the first post in date order. This seems to be working as expected?
As it’s a topic search result list with the latest option, I think we could expect it to be ordered with recently updated topic on top.
Even if we use in:first to narrow down the results drastically.
Maybe it would be a feature instead of a bug?
Oh but yes, I can use by relevanceto get what I want, I forgot that.