if limit: 1 returns a single object, will be a pain in the a** for the most of developers out there.

you will need more code for parsing, and deserialization, which is bad. Consider a single endpoint service that will return a List of Movies, and when you provide limit 1, instead of a list will return to you a movie, boom get a deserialization error. Having to return an array with a single object thought , it would be fine.

It would be helpful if the search API had an option to limit matches to the exact query string given.

The search service is getting completely re-written later this year and it will be designed to support extra parameters like this.

Also, it would be nice to have the option of limiting the number of results returned... I'm thinking 'limit: 1' primarily, which would return a single result instead of an array, but there may be other uses :)

I am not sure I'll ever support custom page sizes but regardless, the results field is just an array. If you are only interested in the first results, it's easy enough to only grab that single object.