Search Page Custom Pagination

Is it possible to use common.widget.pager and paging.pageableItem.build() on the search page? If so how would you go about getting the total items for setTotalItems(total_items)? With a little experimenting I found the search page caps results at 1000 and rounds the displayed number of results to the nearest thousand, so maybe this just isn't possible for the search page. Has anyone else had any success customizing the search page pagination?

Thanks