Why, when I do a search in a single forum (or whatever they’re called here) do the answers come all mixed up, rather than in order? The logical – and, in my mind, most useful – way to present them would be with the newest post first, followed by all the others in reverse order by posting time.
If you go to the detailed sort page and scroll down, just below the main control panel of sorting switches at lower right there is one that says: “Sort by”, with a dropdown with 6 choices. Confusingly, that setting does not appear until after you’ve performed a search and gotten a results list. Then it appears. Which is IMO dumb. It essentially forces you to search twice, once in the wrong order then once again in the right. But …
My experiments show that that sort setting is sticky. It’ll stay the same for you from one search to the next until you change it. I like mine sorted by “Latest post”.
So whenever I do a search from the magnifying glass dropdown on any page, not just category pages, the results always come back the first time sorted by the date of the last post in each thread with the newest such thread on top. So I’m seeing the latest content near the top. Depending on whether the thread containing those recent last posts is a week or a decade old, the OP’s will not be in date order. But I can switch to Latest Topic order to see them in OP order. Or any other order they offer.
Just tried that, searching for Mollie. First three results were Nov 2024, Oct 29 [2025], and May 25 (all for Molly, not Mollie). Then came Apr 27 and Mar 9, with none of the many posts between 27 Apr and today that I know mentioned Mollie.
Did you try the advanced search, like Search results for 'Mollie #miscellaneous-and-personal-stuff-i-must-share order:latest' - Straight Dope Message Board ?
Also, there is a difference between “Sort by: Latest topic” and “Sort by: Latest post”, depending on which you mean (when a matching thread was first started, vs the time of its latest matching reply)
Video, just cuz it’s not the easiest to find otherwise…
Sounds like your default sort order is “relevance”. Fix that as I described above and I bet you’ll solve your problem.
As I said,
Not to mention that “Molly” was totally irrelevant in a search for “Mollie”.
Put it in quotes , like "mollie", to make it do an exact search, like Search results for '"Mollie" #miscellaneous-and-personal-stuff-i-must-share order:latest' - Straight Dope Message Board
PS You might already know this, but the SDMB just runs on a standard piece of commercial forum software called Discourse, whose search just isn’t very good. We also don’t really have an active admin anymore who can do anything about it, so you’re kinda stuck fighting the advanced search operators to try to get what you want.
If you’re looking for something in particular, I find that AI can generally search these forums much better than the built-in search can, since it can read hundreds of posts at a time and judge them in context against the actual intent of your request, not just look for plain keywords.