Type Ahead Searches with jQuery

I was working on a mobile app and wanted to try a type ahead search to easy the user typing on a phone keyboard. I was able to make the ajax calls using jQuery to get the data, but I ran into some race conditions. As the user typed I made an ajax call but sometimes the first ajax call would take longer than the second. Thus updating the results with the first ajax calls data, because it finished later.

Example:
I starting typing "b". Then it would fire off an ajax call to get all the data with the letter "b".

Next I typed "a". So my search input box looked like this "ba". And firing off another ajax call to get all the data with the letters "ba".

I didn't know this but you can put the ajax request in a variable and kill it. Check it out.

<script type="text/javascript">
       var ajaxCall;
       typeAheadSearch = function(){
               if(ajaxCall != undefined){
                       ajaxCall.abort();
               }
               
               ajaxCall = jQuery.ajax({
                       url: "http://www.somedomain.com/typeAheadSearch/_results.cfm",
                       data:{search:jQuery("##search").val()},
                       success:function(data){
                               jQuery("##results").html(data);
                       }
               });
       };
</script>

I started a variable called "ajaxCall" to store the request in. The first thing I do in the typeAheadSearch() is kill the current request by calling abort(). The next thing that I didn't know you could is that jQuery's ajax() returns the request. This is so handy.