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
Those “nonsense” characters are more than like url parameters which don’t have anything to do with the page itself, but instead pass back information. Usually for tracking. These could be things like where the user was referred from etc. E.g. if you went to www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive?source=google; you’re getting this subreddit but there’s a parameter saying that you came from Google to get here (assuming that the server wants a parameter called “source”, this is a hypothetical example)
If you see a question mark in the url, you can – in most cases – remove it and everything that comes after and still get the page. There will be some instances where this breaks because what gets passed over might be a validation key to be allowed to view something (you can see this for example if you open an image from Facebook – the parameters are a way of allowing not-logged in users to still view the actual photograph.)
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