There should at least be a feature to sort the results by date and it shows only the <N> most recent or oldest results.
There is a feature to sort the results by date when using the forum search option;
https://i.imgur.com/Shmx3c5.pngOn the
message age section, you can choose the periods you wish to search for, for example
Between 10 and 15 days, means you'll be searching for results older than ten days ago, but less than 15 days ago. With this, you can search within any timeframe you wish to, by just calculating the days interval.
Thanks for the pointer to the search options, and specifically to sort the search results, but I just tried it and it doesn't sort the results by "most recent topic first" even though I chose that sort order. My results displayed in a random order - 2018,2018,2013,2017,2011,2014. Makes searching for the most recent topic quite hard when it doesn't :-(
