Pagination on a search page

[eluser]Amenthes[/eluser]
Hi guys, I'm confronted with the following problem. I have a search page that will return large result sets, so a pagination is needed. My question is where should I store the keyword of the search and what should I set "base_url" to in the pagination config array. At a first glance I thought the keyword should be a simple URI segment, but...

1. How do I pass that segment from my search from, which cannot have a POST method as the pagination won't work anymore;
2. What if a user enters a keyword containing a "/"(forward slash)? Basically it will split my segment into two.

I think this is a case where $_GET would do the job but even so, the pagination class won't work because it will append the pagination segment after the GET params. The only solution I can think of is: first, POST the keyword from the form, build the query with that keyword, then generate the base_url of the pagination including an aditional segement - the POST-ed keyword (with any forward slashes replaced by underscores). Then, on any other hit I check if $this->input->post('keyword') returns false, if it does I look for the specific keyword segment and rebuild the query and the pagination. Not very elegant though.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.