If I'm reading you right, Kai, the question to pose to the product owner is: when our user gets 50+ search results for, in my case, a teaching resource, what do you want most of them to do? Browse through them all, sort, or filter? It's quite common in the web platform I work on to have hundreds of results, or for a topic landing page to have hundreds of individual items, such as Videos, Lesson Plans, etc. Currently our default display uses a "relevance" algorithm, but that means on topic pages, users see pretty much the same items at the top every time they visit the page.

I would love to hear your thoughts!