Why do some specific web pages have addresses that contain SEVERAL dozen nonsense characters in the address bar? Even if there are quadrillions of individual web pages there are still way too many characters than necessary for them all to be unique and leave room for more.
In: Technology
A lot of it is for tracking purposes and for filtering products. Rather than seeing the address as one thing see it as a series of 8-10 things. Some are names others are sets of random alphaneumerals that can include some of:
The name of the website i.e. Nike.com
the referring search engine i.e. Google, normally as a code
the name of the ad campaign Nike is paying for i.e. utm856304
The name of any affiliate partners involved as a code i.e 649263850 might mean NYTimes.com so that if you buy shoes after clicking on a link from NYTimes.com Nike will pay 3% or so to NY times.
The product name, either as the name or as a code. Of note there could be some system of these where the 2023 version of a shoe is 3456 and the 2024 version is 3457. It could also be random or chronological or a host of other systems that make sense to the people at Nike but is gobeldygook to an Internet user.
Then it gets to filtering. If you are looking at shoes and start clicking the filters on the side of the page more sophisticated e-commerce sites will handle that with a new address, often separated by a % or other less used character. If you click ‘Red’ that might add %_red/ to you address.
And then tracking of you or your session on the site as a specific computer/phone as a randomly generated string of characters. Sometimes this is in the address, sometimes it is kept hidden from you.
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