It's a technology - not a caustic cleaner

Do a search on Google Maps for your house, and you'll see a nice enough map of your neighborhood. Now hold down the mouse button. You'll find you can move the map around as quickly as if it were sitting on a table. Zooming in and out, there's no delay waiting for the page to reload. And you can switch instantly to corresponding satellite photos and even a combined map-photo view.

Credit this speed of use to a loose-knit set of programming technologies known as Ajax. It's also helping to spur the explosion of web sites like Flickr and Gmail, and help you take a more active part in 'surfing the web' (how I loathe that term).

Essentially, Ajax speeds up the web experience, vastly reducing the notorious world wide wait. It's fascinating stuff, even though I don't fully understand it myself. If you're interested, you can read about it here.