This is par for the course. When doing a library course in university, I learned that you typically end up discarding up to 99% of sources. (very rough rule of thumb: you get say something like 1000 hits, review the top 100 titles, read the top 10 abstracts, and select the remaining article(s) as a source. Wash rinse repeat)
If your 1000 hits is roughly reasonable to you, mind if I ask how you find so many sources? In something I'm interested in, I rarely find even a dozen hits on things that seem vaguely related. And for more than half of those, I can't even find access.
Maybe you're counting differently? If near the end you have a dozen papers that you're sufficiently interested in that you're actively trying to access them already, that sounds pretty decent really.
Can you give an example of something you've been searching for?
