[pbadams]

Part of the difficulty is, if very few people are browsing to page 2, deciding what to put on page 2 becomes harder and harder.

Google has a lot of user behavior signals to decide what should be in results 1-10. Deciding if a page should be ranked 20, 200, or 2000 without any user clicks to check if you're right is really difficult.

I would bet that since 2008/9, the relative numbers of spam site operators, Google engineers, second-page searches have changed significantly.