search results - news descending...

[broon]

I can see in admin of the search module that you can choose to
'Sort results alphabetically instead of by weight'
My question: Is there a quick way of showing results by date descending. Most of my results are news.. so it seems it would make more sense for default to sort by date ( latest first)
Are there any quick tags I may have missed in { search }..or does this need some fairly major recoding? thanks for any guidance.