I don't know whether this fits the description "custom" (i wish it were the default behavior)
Please consider displaying atop the search results page
"XX results found"
or something to that effect, indicating the total number/count.
Why wish for this? Thanks for asking (ha ha)
If my search was "too generic" and resulted in too many matching items, I probably won't welcome sifting through many pages. If the search results page would inform me, right up front, "found 513 matches"... I'd realize that I ought to use a more specoffic query.