StartKey in View Url

I was working with StartKey argument in a view's url to help enable a search feature.

It was a headache. For some reason my startKey argrment was completely ignored by the browser.

EOD I found the following,

1. The first column in the view should show only simple text values. Date values with "/"s and other values with special characters are a head ache.
2. This wont work properly with views containing their first column as a hidden column
3. Your first column must be sorted for this argument to work.

I am not sure whether all of these are true or not. But its my understanding as per my experimentations so far.