That's great as long as you're using something with efficient random-access (SQL). If your datastore/back-end is btree-based, however (say, CouchDB for example

That's great as long as you're using something with efficient random-access (SQL). If your datastore/back-end is btree-based, however (say, CouchDB for example, or Google search results) you're better off with 'next', 'prev', 'first', etc. pagination. Asking for the 50,000th record means skipping the first 49,999! So, you may be painting your back-end into a corner by counting on random-access being an efficient operation.