XML requests beyond the pagination limit

[Lacy]

I understand clearly that on the default frontend, if you click page 5
in the search results pagination and there are only 3 pages, you will
get taken to page 3. In a custom frontend I'm translating the XML
results into pagination links. There is no XML parameter to
communicate this exception; "Hey, you asked for results 40-50 but all
I have is 30 results" etc..

The most curious part about this is that I do get results for a bad
request. Requesting results 40-50 returns pages that only match
between some newly implemented googleoff tags like <!--googleoff:
index--> etc. This is somewhat friendly but undesired in this case.

[Lacy]

This may be considered a bug. With the same configuration, the XML
requests return a different result set than the default frontend.

The answer made itself apparent after I added <!--googleoff snippet-->
tags to the navigation / duplicate content. The XML started behaving
like the google frontend and only gave relative results.