Pagination on stackexchange.com search is broken

Question

Some searches on stackexchange.com seem to give the wrong number of results. E.g. searching for url:wiki.openttd.org gives 77 results, but they fit on 2 pages of max. 30 results; if you set the page size to 50, they all fit on one page. @rene's analysis is spot on: manually navigating to page 2 gives the other 27. The pagination is broken; it's not related to searching for URLs because searching for 'smokedetector' has pagination problems too.

Answer 1

This functionality is crucial in some cases of investigating spam or abuse.

I have therefore created a userscript to correct the functionality. See the Stack Apps post: Fix for the network search pagination

To make sure this post is self-contained:

Installation

Direct install (GitHub)

See the code on GitHub

Code:

// ==UserScript==
// @name            Stack Exchange - fix network search pagination
// @namespace        https://github.com/PurpleMagick/
// @description        Network search pagination is broken and does not count pages correctly. This is a fix
// @author            VLAZ
// @version            1.0.0
//
// @match           https://stackexchange.com/search*
//
// @grant            none
// ==/UserScript==

let __webpack_exports__ = {};

// CONCATENATED MODULE: ./src/paginationParametersHelpers.ts
function retrievePagesize() {
    const searchParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
    return Number(searchParams.get("pagesize") ?? 15);
}
function createCorrecURL(href, pagesize) {
    const url = new URL(href);
    url.searchParams.set("pagesize", String(pagesize));
    return url;
}

// CONCATENATED MODULE: ./src/index.ts

function main() {
    const perPage = retrievePagesize();
    const searchParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
    if (searchParams.has("pagesize") === false) {
        window.location.href = createCorrecURL(window.location.href, perPage).href;
        return;
    }
    document.querySelectorAll(".pager a")
        .forEach(el => {
            el.href = createCorrecURL(el.href, perPage).href;
        });
}
main();

If you need to know how to install userscripts, see:

• the tag description over at Stack Apps
• the guide over at Greasyfork.