Last modified: 2014-03-28 23:25:09 UTC
Sorting results by date results in a degraded user experience due to it essentially throwing the scoring algorithm out of the window and therefore leads to the user being presented with mostly irrelevant results. That said, it may make sense to allow users to filter out results that have not been edited recently (for some definition of recently). For example: 1) Search English Wikipedia for "David Cameron". 2) Discard any results that have not been edited "recently" (e.g. in the past month). 3) Display to the user anything that's left. Particulars: 1) Unlike sorting by date, this does *not* throw the scoring algorithm out of the window as the results are still displayed in the order that the scoring algorithm wants... it's just that certain results are omitted. 2) The feature may not make sense from a design or engineering perspective. In particular, the use case may already be satisfied by the fact that the scoring algorithm can take recency into account. We need to get together and think about that.
Going with low on this one, as we've got way bigger fish to fry in the search page redesign than this one.
We sort of already allow this. Would just be a matter of extending it as needed. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search/CirrusSearchFeatures#prefer-recent:
