When judging software, blaming users for not making enough efforts to follow bad UX is never a good idea, besides being plain wrong. There's actually something called
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for this exact purpose, a pillar for good software design (whether it's systems or interfaces). Applying it to result driven features, it translates to familiar default configs, which in this case is chronological order.
Neither did I. Just goes to show that making configs available is never a substitute for good defaults.
One way to make it an even better experience is to expose the config in the UI of the search result on top of being available in the account preferences.