JS was waay too slow, but it turned out that even back then XSLT was blazing fast. So I basically generated XML with all the data, wrote a simple XSLT with one clever XPath that generated search input form, did the search and displayed the results, slapped the xml file in CD auto-run and called it a day. It was finding results in a second or less. One of my best hacks ever.
Since then I always wanted to make a html templating system that compiles to XSLT and does the HTML generation on client side. I wrote some, but back then Firefox didn't support displaying XML+XSLT directly and the workaround I came up with I didn't like. Then the AJAX came and then JS got faster and client side rendering with JS became viable. But I still think it's a good idea, to send just dynamic XMLs with static XSLTs preloaded and cached, if we ever want to come back to purely server driven request-response flow. Especially if binary format for XML catches on.