@Deskana (WMF) added "relevant" to "search results" in the opening paragraph, but I took it back out. We obviously prefer relevant results, but we do seem to have settled on the idea that, for human searchers (not bots), showing something is probably better than showing nothing, hence some of the semi-desperate searching approaches that work some of the time, but not even close to all the time.
Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Discovery/So Many Search Options
I think "not obviously irrelevant" would be better than "relevant", although that's much less catchy. ;-)
Having thought about it more, the point I'm trying to make is that the trivial solution of showing random results rather than showing nothing is bad, but showing possibly irrelevant results is probably better than showing them nothing.
I'm not sure how best to represent this.
I think we need to be careful here because we still don't know too much (by "we" I mean both code and us as developers) about how relevant the results we are returning are. It's a very hard question. So we should not commit to something we have little hope to deliver. We can provide more search results, we can hope more results is better than no results, but claiming any of this would surely provide more relevant results sounds to me like being more bold that we can (yet?) afford to.