This recipe will allow you to display as many, or as few, products on your result pages of product listing and Advanced Search as you would like, without sacrificing admin usability. We are adding a new key, Search-Results Catalog, to be used only for the catalog part of search-result limits while leaving the current value in place, so admin can continue to use it.
This is what your product listing will look like when you set the parameter for Search Results in Administration | Configuration | Maximum Values to list only three products per page:
Note
Chef's suggestion:
If you try to modify the value for search results in Administration | Configuration | Search Results, you will notice it also influences all listings for admin, resulting in Countries, Catalog, Customers, and Orders each displaying lists limited by the modified value. Having an extensive Countries list, for example, with display being limited to three...