Magento – Magento quick search results displaying all on one page

You can achieve this by layout update. For this you need to follow these steps

Create local.xml file

This is a special layout file that will process by Magento after processing every other layout updation files. So this file is a perfect place to do "alteration" works.

File: app/design/frontend/<package>/<theme>/layout/local.xml

<layout>
    <catalogsearch_result_index>
        <reference name="product_list_toolbar">
            <action method="addPagerLimit"><mode>grid</mode><limit>30</limit></action>
            <action method="addPagerLimit"><mode>list</mode><limit>30</limit></action>
        </reference>
    </catalogsearch_result_index>
</layout>

Explanation Of Code

As you can see, we are using a layout handle catalogsearch_result_index, which is a unique handler for search pages. So any layout updates comes under this particular layout handle only affect in search result page. Next we have used an action addPagerLimit() in a block product_list_toolbar in order to set the page size.addPagerLimit() uses two parameter for its internal operation. First parmeter specifies which list mode we need to alter. Basically there are two list modes. They are list and grid. Next parameter is the limit. This is used to set the toolbar size. So basically using our layout update, we set page size for all available list of modes that should only affect in search page.

Note: Don't forget to clear the cache

Well done for doing local.xml, however, for the list part of category and search result pages layout updates in local.xml cannot be relied upon. I cannot fully remember the reason for this, but I think this is the problem here!!!

Try moving your layout updates to the .xml files in your theme (as copied from base, the proper Magento way).

If this does not work... Maybe the templates rather than the layout is where the problem is.

The search results use the same category list templates as the main category pages. The side nav, header and other page elements may be different but that main list template is the same.

Go into admin->system->config->catalog->catalog and change the products per page there, as predicted this should affect the products in your template.

Next, how to fix. If it wasn't the local.xml problem mentioned above, I suspect that the $collection is being created properly, paginating on 30, however, the template is hard wired to different settings, to show 9. If this changes based on the catalog admin settings you are nearer to knowing what is going on.