Sorting search by recent is confusing

[ekzyis]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Describe the bug

See https://stacker.news/items/922174?commentId=923744

Screenshots

Steps To Reproduce

not verified myself:

1. Go to search
2. Sort by recent
3. Some results are in wrong order

Expected behavior

All results are chronologically sorted

Logs

No response

Device information

No response

Additional context

No response

[huumn]

it's just no longer strictly ordered by recent. It's now weighted by recency but blended with relevance.

I understand the frustration but I'm not sure what we should do about it. @SimpleStacker do you have an opinion?

[ed-kung]

Yes I can see that it might be confusing and misunderstood as a bug. If we think strict chronological order is very important, I think we'd have to do something where a relevance cutoff score is used to determine which results are retrieved, then all retrieved results are sorted strictly by date. (I think that's what the previous iteration was trying, but the cutoff may have been too strict, requiring exact phrase matches).

Overall though I think the important metric is how many clicks does it take a user to find what they're looking for. We can't really measure that directly right now, but I was actually planning to make a bounty post asking something along the lines of:

"Think of a post you remember from stacker.news, but don't remember the exact title or details. Try to search for it. What search query did you use, and were you able to find it quickly?"