Thanks everyone, these pointers were really helpful. At one time I think I set it to "most recent" and forgot about it, since I'm not using the finder a whole

Thanks everyone, these pointers were really helpful. At one time I think I set it to "most recent" and forgot about it, since I'm not using the finder a whole lot. I hadn't even thought about going into settings, so I went there and did some tweaks, including defaulting to searching within folder by default, and changing some locations that it defaults to, which I think will really help.