Bug when getting the next page of questions

Question

I've noticed a bug where questions can be skipped when moving to the next page of questions.

Try the following:

1. Search for a tag that has more than one page of results.
2. Click to the second page of search results to see what the first question on that page is. So that I can refer back to it, let's call it The Question.
3. Click back to the first page of search results.
4. Retag one of the questions on the first page so that it no longer contains the tag you searched for.
5. Click back to the search results.
6. Click to the second page. (I ordinarily do this after I've finished reading any questions of interest on the first page and decided to click to the next to see more questions.)
7. You'll notice that The Question is no longer displayed at the top of the second page of search results. You can find it by moving back to the first page, but it didn't display at the bottom of the first page before moving to the second page. Unless you happened to refresh your page right before clicking to the next page, you would never even know the question existed.

To fix this bug, it would be necessary to load all questions beyond the last that was actually displayed on the first page. (At the moment, it loads questions based on the number which should be displayed on the previous page, regardless of whether those questions actually were displayed. It doesn't take into account the changing search results.)

Answer 1

That doesn't sound like a bug to me, that sounds like the search engine working as intended. When you click "back", your browser loads a cached version of the previous page, so it won't have refreshed and asked the server to display a result set from the recalculated index (now that you've edited a tag). When you go to the second page, you're now seeing the second page of the result set after the index has updated, which means the Question is no longer displayed there. Then if you go back to the first page (without clicking "back"), you'll see the new first page, too, which does include the Question at the bottom.

Doing what you propose is unlikely to be implemented, as for every single search you'd be inefficiently loading more results than need to be displayed, just to handle this one particular edge case. So even if we classify this as a bug in the user experience (even though it makes sense why this is happening), it probably wouldn't weigh up against the engineering impact.

Given that I don't work for Stack Exchange, my answer may be completely incorrect and make no sense at all, but they do use a search client I'm familiar with, so I figured I'd try and answer anyway. :)