Can you make a search component return all pages in the search path?

Ahh sorry my bad there it should be  -> map.put("p.limit", "20"); and that will work fine.

The thing in my example was that i did not make use of the actual search/result in the way you decided to proceed.
I was doing a query that resulted in a collection of hits where each hit corresponded to a component node. I extraced the resource from each hit and made use of a special .jsp file connected to the component resource that i wanted to show as the result.
This is an example of how it can be set up.
1) Make use of special jsp pages
 i) MyComponent.jsp <- standard jsp page for the component
 ii) MyComponentSearched <- presenting the component in a search result
This method, including the components search-jsp is one way of displaying in the search results.

2) Or simply extract the information out of each resource in the loop and present it that way
 

<%for (Hit hit: hits) { Resource myResource = hit.getResource(); ValueMap eventProperties = myResource.adaptTo(ValueMap.class); String myTitle = eventProperties.get("mycomponent/jcr:title", "notitlefound"); String myText = eventProperties.get("mycomponent/jcr:description", "nottextfound"); %> <div class="searchhit"> <div class="title"><%=myTitle%></div> <div class="text"><%=myText%></div> </div> <%}%>

But as you probably have noticed, you get a lot of nice features when using the built-in search results/queries like pagination etc. that you will otherwise have to do yourself. Since I did not use the OOB features I also had to implement my own pagination which was not that difficult once you have set the number of results/page and counted how many results you got in total. After that you could use the query.setStart(start) as you already have there to start the presentation from the corresponding result.

Also, to come to terms with the build in search results, you could take a look at the system console and customize the excerpt properties for the "Day CQ Query Builder". 

Thank you very much for your response! It put me in the right direction although I had to make some changes to make it compile (apparently you even need to import standard Java classes like HashMap and Map. I borrowed some code from the Query Builder documentation as well, but there seem to be some errors in there too.

I had copied this code from there

map.put("p.offset", 0);
map.put("p.limit", 20);

But this doesn't work as Map<String, String> doesn't allow adding int values.

For displaying the search results I borrowed the code from the search component rendering script. Oddily enough I could not simply use this. Apparently the Search results generated from the search component and the ones generated by a query are different object classes?

I had to work with http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/javadoc/com/day/cq/search/result/Hit.html and this doesn't support properties like URL and similarURL. So these made my page crash initially. So replaced those with 'path'. But then my links didn't work as they didn't end in '.html'. So I hardcoded this suffix after each path. Commented out the similarURL part as I didn't need it.

The excerpt value apparently comes from the Description you enter in the Page properties in the siteadmin. But there strange things happened as well. When I enter a description longer than 151 characters it would print only the last 55 characters??? What is this all about? (I am working in version 5.6.0)

So my resulting code looks like:

<%--

  Job Overview component.

  Shows all jobs, but also allows to enter a search term

--%><%
%>
<%@include file="/libs/foundation/global.jsp" %><%
%><%@ page import="java.util.Map,
                   java.util.HashMap,
                   com.day.cq.search.Query,
                   com.day.cq.search.PredicateGroup,
                   com.day.cq.search.QueryBuilder,
                   com.day.cq.search.result.SearchResult" %><%
%><cq:setContentBundle/><%

//Start of with initializing the search query, which might be empty in your case the first time someone enters the page
String searchTerm = "";
String searchPath =  currentPage.getPath();
boolean searched = false; // If there has been a search or not
if (slingRequest.getRequestParameter("q") != null ) {
    searchTerm = slingRequest.getRequestParameter("q").getString("UTF-8"); //Get the queryparameter (q in this case)
    searched = true;
}
//searchTerm = "*" + searchTerm + "*"; //Add some wildcards if you like

//Initialize a search query with the searchterm fetched above
Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>();
map.put("path", searchPath);
map.put("type", "cq:Page");
map.put("group.p.or", "true"); // combine this group with OR
map.put("group.1_fulltext", searchTerm);
map.put("group.1_fulltext.relPath", "jcr:content");
//map.put("orderby","SOME_ORDER_CRITERIA");
//map.put("p.offset", 0); THIS DOESN"T WORK AS YOU CAN'T ADD STRING, INT INTO A STRING, STRING Map// same as query.setStart(0)
//map.put("p.limit", 20); // same as query.setHitsPerPage(20)

QueryBuilder builder = resource.getResourceResolver().adaptTo(QueryBuilder.class);
Session session = resource.getResourceResolver().adaptTo(Session.class);
Query query = builder.createQuery(PredicateGroup.create(map), session);

query.setStart(0);
query.setHitsPerPage(20);

SearchResult result = query.getResult(); // Execute the query

pageContext.setAttribute("searchTerm", searchTerm);
pageContext.setAttribute("searchResult", result);
%>
<center>
    <form action="${currentPage.path}.html">
        <input size="41" maxlength="2048" name="q" value="${fn:escapeXml(searchTerm)}"/>
        <input value="<fmt:message key="searchButtonText"/>" type="submit" />
    </form>
</center>

               <br/>
            <c:set var="result" value="${searchResult}"/>
            <c:choose>
                <c:when test="${empty result && empty searchTerm}">
                </c:when>
                <c:when test="${empty result.hits}">
                    <%--
                    <c:if test="${result.spellcheck != null}">
                      <p><fmt:message key="spellcheckText"/> <a href="<c:url value="${currentPage.path}.html"><c:param name="q" value="${result.spellcheck}"/></c:url>"><b><c:out value="${result.spellcheck}"/></b></a></p>
                    </c:if>
                    --%>
                    <fmt:message key="noResultsText">
                        <h1 class="page-title"><fmt:param value="${fn:escapeXml(searchTerm)}"/></h1>
                    </fmt:message>
                </c:when>
                  <c:otherwise>
                    <h1 class="page-title">Results ${result.startIndex + 1} - ${result.startIndex + fn:length(result.hits)} of ${result.totalMatches} for <b>${fn:escapeXml(searchTerm)}</b>. (${result.executionTime} seconds)</h1>
                       <br/>

                    <div class="content clearfix">
                          <c:forEach var="hit" items="${result.hits}" varStatus="status">
                            <div>
                                <h2><a href="${hit.path}.html" title="${hit.title}">${hit.title}</a></h2>
                                <div class="content clearfix">
                                    <p>${hit.excerpt}</p>
                                </div>
                                <p class="links">
                                    <a class="button-default" href="${hit.path}.html" title="${hit.title}">Continue Reading</a>
                                </p>
                                <div class="hiturl"> ${hit.path}.html<c:if test="${!empty hit.properties['cq:lastModified']}"> - <c:catch><fmt:formatDate value="${hit.properties['cq:lastModified'].time}" dateStyle="medium"/></c:catch></c:if><%-- DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS AS similarURL doesn't exist on this Hit object - <a href="${hit.similarURL}"><fmt:message key="similarPagesText"/></a> --%></div>
                                <hr/>
                            </div>
                          </c:forEach>
                    </div>
                      <br/>   

                  <c:if test="${fn:length(result.resultPages) > 1}">
                    <div class="pagination">
                        <fmt:message key="resultPagesText"/>
                        <c:if test="${result.previousPage != null}">
                          <a href="${result.previousPage.URL}"><fmt:message key="previousText"/></a>
                        </c:if>
                        <c:forEach var="page" items="${result.resultPages}">
                          <c:choose>
                            <c:when test="${page.currentPage}">${page.index + 1}</c:when>
                            <c:otherwise>
                              <a href="${page.URL}">${page.index + 1}</a>
                            </c:otherwise>
                          </c:choose>
                        </c:forEach>
                        <c:if test="${result.nextPage != null}">
                          <a href="${result.nextPage.URL}"><fmt:message key="nextText"/></a>
                        </c:if>
                    </div>
                  </c:if>
              </c:otherwise>
            </c:choose>

Greetz,

Ivo