Was there a change in what client.Search() returns?

We have a job that finds a particular type of pages, updates and publishes them. If publishing fails a draft is saved.

This is our code to retrieve a page that needs to be updated

return _client.Search<AuthorPage>()
    .Filter(x => x.IsDeleted.Match(false))
    .Filter(x => x.SearchSubsection().Match("Authors"))
    .Filter(x => x.Email.MatchCaseInsensitive(email))
    .GetContentResult()
    .Where(x => !x.IsExpired())
    .OrderByDescending(x => x.Status)
    .FirstOrDefault()

We were Ordering by status because we were getting both a published version and a draft; but if there was a draft we wanted to update this version and to try publish it.

And no matter how many times a job would fail to publish a page, it should try to update the same draft. That is how it worked in CMS 11.

Now in CMS 12 under some Author pages we are seeing a lot of drafts and have noticed that the same query even before the FirstOrDefault() already returns only one result - the published version (unless there is no published version and only a draft, then this one is returned). Then the job tries to update it but if it fails it creates a new draft, and the next time it fails it creates yet another draft and so on. Eventually when a page is published we end up with a lot of drafts. 

Was there some kind of change in what Search method returns? 

Is there an overload? Another method? How do we get the same result as before?