Repeatedly updating a page div in Rails from the Controller

I have a Rails 3 application that performs a long task of making several queries to a database to find documents. I want to show the user the progress of through the set of queries. I created a jquery function that employs the jquery.ui.progressbar. I want to update the progress bar dynamically as the document search controller loops through the search phrases. I need to know how to dynamically call the javascript to update the progressbar div in the document view. Please let me know how to call the javascript from the rails controller.