It's a pain that search results on lemmy show by default ordered by some useless relevance ranking. I can't think of a single time I didn't want newest first. I couldn't find a preference to request that. It would be great if there was one.
The suggestion on c/support on lemmy.world was to make this kind of request on github, but it seems anti-FOSS to me to require a Microsoft account for a fediverse request, so I'm posting here and hoping for the best.
I agree, the search results should default to sort by new. Regardless of what your default user setting is. This is how it works on https://old.lemmy.world
Aha, I didn't know about or forgot about old.lemmy.world. I'll try that now. But, I'd be satisfied with whatever default, as long as there is a way to change it.