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 just changed my default sort from Hot to New and then back again - so those two values for that option definitely work. If you are using some third-party client to access Lemmy, I cannot say the same for it - perhaps it has a bug? But most places on Lemmy I've been have these in their settings and they work - the issue is on your end.
Which is empowering bc you can play around with a bunch of different things and find a way that will work, rather than have to wait on the devs to decide to help or not:-).
e.g. you could bookmark this link: https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&sort=New. Speaking of, perhaps your bookmark to access Lemmy has a similar setting, but for Hot and that is overriding your default choice? Or after you set the default, are you certain that it is saving properly?
Anyway, I hope I gave you some interesting ideas to check up on:-).
Oh that's an interesting approach. Yeah I might try that. Thanks. I'm used to the magnifying glass icon being right next to the search entry field, but as long as it's just a link anyway, I might as well use a different link.
Sometimes I want to find something, like an image that I have shared previously (for ease of reuse but also to reduce the load on the servers to not have to store it multiple times), and so I'll want to search comments (not posts) by sth like Top Month or Top Week, but ofc cannot:-(. So instead like a chump I just go through them one by one until I find what I wanted... It's annoying to visually see those options provided, yet they do not function as you would expect. So indeed, they need to do a lot of work on the search functions:-).