There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer for that question. The key thing to remember is not to overwhelm your visitors with a massive set of results that are only quasi-relevant to the search being performed. Your site is only limited in focus, therefore your internal site search results should be limited as well. [Tweet This]
On the most basic level, keep your search results limited to the specific search performed. Don’t dig too deep into “related” results unless you have those segmented separately. This will help searchers zero in on what they want. If the primary results don’t give them what they want they can perform a second search without having to wade through a bunch of ancillary results.
What do you think the ideal number of search results is? Let us know in the comments!