Maybe add the words "than before" to the title? 60% exclusive means exclusive files are more important, though not as much as before.

Not sure how you - or they - would define better, but in a lot of searches, large blocks of 0 dls indie uploads, often very similar, are trumping exclusive files with sales. But unlike the OP, I don't find all searches have the same pattern in best match.

Not sure how you - or they - would define better, but in a lot of searches, large blocks of 0 dls indie uploads, often very similar, are trumping exclusive files with sales. But unlike the OP, I don't find all searches have the same pattern in best match.

Are they brand new files or old one with 0 dls.

There should never be large blocks of the images from the same contributor especially if they're 0 sales and not brand new.

I do have a bit of an improvement from about 10 days ago, but the numbers are too low to be definitely significant

Maybe my search is different to yours due to my location. (if that still works)

In the first 100 in the search there a couple of contributors with "blocks of low DL images" 

1 set is an indies illustrations which are marginally keyworded. 5 images /100
1 set is from an exclusive photos uploaded in August this year 12 /100
1 set is from an exclusive photos uploaded in June this year  21/100
1 set is from an indy photos uploaded in July this year 11/100

I'd say there is a definite slant towards new content and there's probably more independent files than there use to be when the best match was heavily slanted to Exclusives.

But on my search its not just indy files in blocks with 0 uploads on the first page.

This search returns 2029 files which is pretty low number compared to alot of other searches. It looks to me that the newest files aren't being flushed out of the first page because of the relatively low number of new images.