Instant Search: allow default results to be turned off

[bluefuton]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When you open the Jetpack Search modal without a query, results are still shown. If sorting by relevance, these will be the posts and pages deemed the most relevant across the whole site. The idea is that the user can start with all results and then use filters to find what they want.

A user has reported that the first two pages shown on their default results are very old posts and are not especially relevant. They would like the ability to turn off the default results when a search query has not been entered.

Describe the solution you'd like

The user is able to turn off the default results using Jetpack Search settings.

We should also consider making this the default option for new users.

Describe alternatives you've considered

We could improve the relevance search. In this case, reducing the relevance score of older results would have helped somewhat.

Additional context

Slack conversation: p1615844037002700-slack-CLKR331CM

[bluefuton]

To do this, we'd need to:

• [ ] add a new configuration option in the Customizer / Gutenberg customization screen
• [ ] make sure the new config option is available to the Jetpack Search app
• [ ] if the config option is enabled, don't request results from the API until we have a search query or filter
• [ ] bonus: think about what we could display to the user if the modal is empty

[thecbsnetwork]

A Newspack client submitted a request for this feature on 29 August 2023

[stature]

Another Newspack client submitted a request for this feature on 5 Dec 2023