A company I worked for in 2001 used chucked streaming to provide search results. The search results were collected by performing live searches in parallel (server side) with multiple partners and then aggregated into a single stream of chunked content. Basically the HTTP connection was kept open until all searches were complete, which would take a few minutes. The results were pushed incrementally to the browser as soon as they were available
This worked surprisingly well. They started with almost pure HTML with the results split into multiple tables to produce what looked like a single table of results. The only drawback was that the columns needed fixed width so that they would align properly.
After a while they switched to a Javascript based solution with dynamic filters. They used the same backend streaming engine to output chunks of Javascript code inside <script>-tags, which called a global "addResult(...)" method to update the state. If the search was cached, it would first render HTML code server side, which was then "hydrated" by the javascript code if needed.
Later it was replaced with a standard XHR polling mechanism.
It is interesting to look back at what we had to do that is trivial with today's technology.