When using any search, both advanced and "forum search"

my results always order with the oldest first. Is there a way to change this default??

Its not a big deal when its something specific, but I was looking for the Work Wheel Whore thread in the galery and the search turned up 400 pages of results which I have learned is the max beacuse that 400th page was only up to results to 2004.

Now, I know i can do advanced and find what I'm looking for. but I was wondering if theres anyway in settings or something that I could have it display automatically the most recent thread/reply with my search string.

Thanks

 

Search for the phrases you want to find and then choose Sort Result by... Date and Z -> A. Z -> A is the default when you choose Date so choosing Date is all you need to do.

I suggest you change the search phrase to something a little more specific which would find a better match to what you are looking for and/or perhaps limit the scope of the results to the Gallery forum using the refinement options on the left.

Results are not presented in date order when you search. The default sort order is by keyword/phase relevance (best match) and then by the order of the posts in the database when the relevance score is the same. The post order is naturally chronological because new posts are inserted at the end of the table so it appears they are sorted by date, oldest first, but that is just due to the way a forum post database works and a large number of poorly relevant results returned from a query which is too vague to properly score.

If you were searching a catalog of song titles for the word "love" which were imported into the database alphabetically it would appear alphabetic or of they were inserted unordered it would appear random again because of the huge number of results with similar relevance scores (vague, commonly used, non-specific query).

To get the best results you need to find a keyword or phrase which is fairly unique to what you are looking for. If you know what you are looking for, a particular thread your read before, try to remember a word or phrase from that thread which would distinguish it from the thousands of other posts containing the term "work wheels". If you are looking for the Works Wheels Whore thread and you know someone called it that the search for that phrase. I also suspect you are searching for work wheels which is saying find all posts containing the word "work" and the word "wheels" which probably is not exactly what you mean. If you want to find the exact phrase work wheels then ask it in double quotes like "work wheels".

That way you'll skip posts like "I polished my wheels after work" or "a friend at work bought some Volk wheels" which aren't what you are looking for.