Hi Phil, at the moment L&L doesn’t include a native way to build faceted searching/filtering. You’re right that the pagination option uses ajax to modify what’s being displayed after the page has loaded which I believe is the same process used by most faceted search/filter plugins. While there isn’t currently native functionality for this, we’ve used L&L on some of our own site builds to create something like this using FacetWP, which we’ve roughly documented here. Basically, you’re using FacetWP for the filter controls and L&L to control what data is displayed for each post. Another user recently used FacetWP to create a faceted search page if the notes in that thread are helpful and I’m sure there are others if you search through the forum. Another user was working with Search and Filter Pro to achieve a similar thing. There’s going to be a new feature in L&L version 3.0.0 that allows working with Search and Filter Pro a bit more efficiently so subscribe to that thread if you’re interested and you’ll get notified when we launch the next version of L&L and post an update in that thread.
I’m sure there may be value in incorporating that kind of functionality natively within L&L at some point in the future but for now hopefully those two options should work for you.