Question

So I know a little bit of PHP, and while I was making custom search links I realized that today google’s url after searching something like “hi” isnt just

http://www.google.com/search?q=hi

instead its this

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=hi&pbx=1&oq=hi&aq=f&aqi=g5&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1705l1911l0l2131l2l2l0l0l0l0l173l299l0.2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.&fp=6c03fc000f912511&biw=1366&bih=681

Just wondering if someone has some insight as to what kind of info the rest of the url is passing along

Answer 1

Some examples of the data passed along:

hl=en #Locale: english
source=hp #Source: homepage
q=hi #Query: hi

In general, it’s just whatever extra data that Google wishes to capture or pass along. As you’ve probably noticed, it’s not required data in the sense that http://www.google.com/search?q=query works fine.