Your clarification makes me wonder if you might wish to reconsider the design:

This subroutine is supposed to display the results of a search on a page. I need to then search within the results...,

Do you really need or want to "display" the initial results? If you don't need the overhead of rendering, is there any reason to introduce it?

You may find it easier and more effective to simply store the initial results in an appropriate structure and then search through that.