Ever wonder why Amazon search results seem to load so fast? Turns out they are employing a cute trick when loading paginated results. Now, this technique is probably patented up the wazoo… so, use at your own risk!

Simply put, each results page contains data for more results than are displayed; so when the user presses next, the ‘extra’ results get shown immediately, and an AJAX call is then dispatched to load the rest. As a result, the user feels as if the search results appeared instantaneously.

Note how the first image requested for the second page of search results is for result #16, not for result #13.

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