next.js is such a joy to work with, congrats on the new version! It's constantly improved, the team is very responsive on github, looking forward to getStaticProps and getServerProps to make offline website generation even better.
If you look at the results, the first 2 results only matched part of the poster's username and many of the top results here are empty threads which are not that useful since HN is mostly for discussions.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's all bad, just pointing out that there are low hanging fruits which can improve results quite a bit.
Also, Algolia seems misspelled in your query which is why it fails when reordering by date: https://imgur.com/a/pO9fBWr, it works otherwise. Although, it says the date is 1 day old when it's just 2 hours old.
The results aren't necessarily better because of the Google knowledge of you, because they are pretty good results even in Private browsing without being logged in.
It just seems to me that HN search does a simple keyword matching and reordering based on points without any ranking (please someone correct if I'm wrong).
So freshness doesn't seem to have any value, but the reality is that, at least in tech, very few content is evergreen. Also, when you try to reorder by date for example, you'll end up with a lot of empty threads which again are not that useful. I'm not sure if there's a way of eliminating empty threads from search results.
For one of my projects, I looked and manually labeled thousands of pictures, yet this issue never came up until people were actually using pictures coming from their smartphones.
I ran into this issue while developing https://www.faceshapeapp.com where user uploads their photo and face detector is run on top of the picture. Shortly after launching about 10% of users complained having rotated images, after some debugging, I discovered that it was due to exif rotation.
It's a social network centered around beauty and self-improvement that also includes ML tools for detecting facial features.