Four Pagination Rules for Customer-Support Knowledge Base Retrieval

A developer argues that pagination in customer-support search should be treated as a retrieval design decision rather than a UI detail. The proposed approach defines a contract covering freshness, required evidence, tenant scope, and a pagination budget before choosing a search backend. Vector search suits durable, access-controlled internal content, while web search suits fast-changing external facts, and the two can be combined with separate citations. The author recommends cursor-based reads over a fixed snapshot for reproducible results and separating ingestion, querying, and answer assembly for easier incident diagnosis. When sources conflict, the system should return a review state showing both citations rather than automatically answering.