Old question, but since the question asks “using jQuery”, I thought I’d provide an option that lets you do this without introducing any vendor dependency.

While there are a lot of templating engines out there, many of their features have fallen in to disfavour recently, with iteration (<% for), conditionals (<% if) and transforms (<%= myString | uppercase %>) seen as microlanguage at best, and anti-patterns at worst. Modern templating practices encourage simply mapping an object to its DOM (or other) representation, e.g. what we see with properties mapped to components in ReactJS (especially stateless components).

Templates Inside HTML

One property you can rely on for keeping the HTML for your template next to the rest of your HTML, is by using a non-executing <script> type, e.g. <script type="text/template">. For your case:

<script type="text/template" data-template="listitem">
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18673860/${url}" class="list-group-item">
        <table>
            <tr>
                <td><img src="${img}"></td>
                <td><p class="list-group-item-text">${title}</p></td>
            </tr>
        </table>
    </a>
</script>

On document load, read your template and tokenize it using a simple String#split

var itemTpl = $('script[data-template="listitem"]').text().split(/\$\{(.+?)\}/g);

Notice that with our token, you get it in the alternating [text, property, text, property] format. This lets us nicely map it using an Array#map, with a mapping function:

function render(props) {
  return function(tok, i) { return (i % 2) ? props[tok] : tok; };
}

Where props could look like { url: 'http://foo.com', img: '/images/bar.png', title: 'Lorem Ipsum' }.

Putting it all together assuming you’ve parsed and loaded your itemTpl as above, and you have an items array in-scope:

$('.search').keyup(function () {
  $('.list-items').append(items.map(function (item) {
    return itemTpl.map(render(item)).join('');
  }));
});

This approach is also only just barely jQuery – you should be able to take the same approach using vanilla javascript with document.querySelector and .innerHTML.

jsfiddle

Templates inside JS

A question to ask yourself is: do you really want/need to define templates as HTML files? You can always componentize + re-use a template the same way you’d re-use most things you want to repeat: with a function.

In es7-land, using destructuring, template strings, and arrow-functions, you can write downright pretty looking component functions that can be easily loaded using the $.fn.html method above.

const Item = ({ url, img, title }) => `
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18673860/${url}" class="list-group-item">
    <div class="image">
      <img src="${img}" />
    </div>
    <p class="list-group-item-text">${title}</p>
  </a>
`;

Then you could easily render it, even mapped from an array, like so:

$('.list-items').html([
  { url: '/foo', img: 'foo.png', title: 'Foo item' },
  { url: '/bar', img: 'bar.png', title: 'Bar item' },
].map(Item).join(''));

Oh and final note: don’t forget to sanitize your properties passed to a template, if they’re read from a DB, or someone could pass in HTML (and then run scripts, etc.) from your page.