It's true that this is the fastest way to handle pagination, but it can really fast become too ugly to code, since you have to do that manually, instead of just

It's true that this is the fastest way to handle pagination, but it can really fast become too ugly to code, since you have to do that manually, instead of just specifying offset and limit and let the DB engine to it. On the other hands, approach Google takes seems more sensible to me, if you have more that some maximum number of results, just refuse to paginate further. Instruct the user to narrow down his query criteria instead. What could be the use for "go to page 1235 / 5433" if not for some kind of crawling database content?