How can I use pagination without knowing the page segment

[eluser]MyDarkPassenger[/eluser]
I'm using the pagination library. One problem I have with it is passing extra data into the links uri. Since pagination needs to know the segment that the page appears in, I can't change the amount of segments in the uri. So I have to pass longer uris like this:

http://localhost/test/main/index/sortby/.../all/page/

instead of cleaner, smaller ones like this.

http://localhost/test/main/index/sortby/name/page/

Is there a way to check for the segment using a name like page instead of a segment like 8. Also, if I need to use segments is there a way to modify the url used by pagination so that I can specify where the page segment can be added like:

"http://localhost/test/main/index/page/" . $page . "/sortby/name/";

This way I can always use segment 3 no matter how long the string is.