Back in October 2010, I gave a talk[0] on the NOSQL database, Riak. Something I mentioned in my talk is very similar to what you are saying here. Particularly that no one cares to paginate through thousands (or far more) results. Beyond that, I was looking at it from a database systems perspective. Certain distributed, non-transactional, non-relational systems, in certain cases, have difficulties keeping absolute counts of items. My insight is that the larger the result set, the less people care about pagination. [0]http://www.slideshare.net/siculars/adding-riak-to-your-nosql-bag-of-tricks , slides 30-32