One of those changes was a change to the engine underneath the search function - it was a minor update from the provider.
This seems to have ruined the search results for some. So we've down-graded the engine for the time being. Can you check the results are to your satisfaction when doing "normal" searches please?
Yes, Ed, it's now back to how it was (which I prefer).
Since the majority of questions asked on AB are about things here and now - e.g. news, sport, weather, crosswords, shopping, technology, films, music, adverts - it seems more sensible (to me) for recent postings to be at the top of the found results rather than questions/answers that were posted several years ago (which is what the changed search was giving).
We'd like to use the new engine, but we clearly haven't got to grips with it's cleverness yet. We'll only use the new one if we can produce those kind of fresh results.
And I agree, those are the most important question types and the ones we should be catering for specifically.