Hi Brent,
In your case I would make a non-persistent entity with a string attribute to use as search helper.
Place this attribute on a page with a search button. When pressing the search button, call a nanoflow and use this non-persistent entity as inputparameter in your microflow. In your microflow you can search for the correct Products and sync these to the device.
Under the search field. Place a listview with Product to display them. You still need to figure out some other stuff, like when searching for a second time and not displaying the results of the first search. But that's for next time :)
We have a setup like this:
In the searchresult place the basic attributes you would need to display in the results listview. Upon pressing search, send the helper to the backend, retrieve the correct objects, create searchresult objects for each found object. These get synced automatically to the client at the end of the microflow (you can't sync non-persistent entities to device with an action). Retrieve them in your page.
In terms of solving the limited search results on the second search that you mentioned, I solved this by using a microflow for the list creation.