(Side note: the non-Maniphest search (top right search bar) does order by relevance, but it doesn't display project tags, making it also useless because more often than not you can't tell what a task is about without clicking through.)

The current default setting for task search is

Please provide steps for / URLs to reproduce what you call "default settings".

@Tgr: You can set a default search settings, it's a per-user preference. Documentation

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/

Open Phabricator main screen while logged out, click on "Tasks & Bugs". (Or visit a task and click "Maniphest" in the breadcrumb.)

Alternatively, register a new Phabricator account, and do the same.

In T187587#3980075, @mmodell wrote:

@Tgr: You can set a default search settings, it's a per-user preference. Documentation

Which is not a good reason to have poor settings for everyone who doesn't.

The default query in maniphest doesn't use a search keyword so relevance doesn't come into play at all, that's why it's grouped and ordered.

In T187587#3980081, @mmodell wrote:

The default query in maniphest doesn't use a search keyword so relevance doesn't come into play at all, that's why it's grouped and ordered.

That makes sense but the only way to do use one is to edit the default search (well one of the default searches anyway) so can we at least have a template that's not grouped/ordered?

Although personally I question that "Open Tasks" is a useful default for anonymous / new Phabricator users. But even "Advanced Search" uses Priority/Priority. Most less experienced users probably mainly use Phabricator to find information about a specific issue and don't care about product manager oriented views. (And probably never even realize that relevance as a result sorting criteria is something that you need to opt in to, it's so alien from the 21st century search experience. It took me a while to figure that out and I use Phabricator a lot.)

Yeah the proper solution would be something like T1375 (make it possible to do Maniphest searches from the search bar, and use appropriate search settings) but that's out of out hands while I don't think anything in this task requires upstream changes.

Also note that group by: priority, order by: priority is a very pointless setting - it basically means order by random (since the groups themselves will be in priority order no matter what the order by setting is, and withing the groups everything has the same priority and you'll probably end up sorting by DB order). When grouping by priority, it should sort either by relevance or by last created or updated.

To make things more actionable, here are some specific recommendations:

Anonymous user:

Also, can this be made the default? If not, I would suggest creating a new saved query called "Search tasks" with those settings and making that the default. Finding the "Edit query" button is a lot more intuitive than finding the "Advanced search" link in the sidebar.

Logged-in user:

I would suggest creating a new saved query called "Search tasks" with those settings

Apparently not possible right now due to T187604: #1054: Unknown column 'ft_doc.epochModified' in 'order clause'.

I don't plan to maintain downstream changes for this