As far as I recall from past discussions with Khoros this is less of a frontend, but more of a backend issue. The ElasticSearch (?) that gets queried for the search only returns fuzzy results in regard to the query results, e.g. "We have more than ~18 results for this query. Ask me for a specific page of the result set and I can tell you more". That's why the pagination keeps getting expanded as users click through the result pages until they reach the truly last result page.
So not much you can improve on the frontend, I'm afraid. Although I share your concern that this is reducing the excitement about the richness of topic coverage on a community when gauged via search 😞
