I have a Magento setup with a mobile skin and a separate customized skin. When I use the mobile skin and search, the same 5 results are returned. If I search on the normal front end though, the search results work correctly. I looked at the result.phtml file in the mobile skin dir and replaced it with one from base, but there wasn't a change in behavior.
Anyone ever encounter this issue before?
I found the issue. The catalogsearch.xml in layout/ was corrupted and causing false search results in the mobile skin. This was custom to the mobile skin so once I removed it and cleared the cache, then it used the default xml and it works now.