About Query Strings

Query Strings is a resource for those seeking to find Google Maps, Google Video, Youtube, Gmail, and Google Talk query strings.

A query string is the part of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that contains data to be passed to web applications such as CGI programs. When a web page is requested via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the server locates a file in its file system based on the requested URL. This file may be a regular file or a program. If it is a program, the server may run the program (depending on its configuration), sending its output as the required page. The query string is a part of the URL which is passed to the program. It’s use permits data to be passed from the HTTP client (often a web browser like Mozilla Firefox) to the program which generates the web page.

This site uses software from WordPress which uses query strings to indicate criteria to search for specific posts or sets of posts in the database. This default use of query strings may reduce search engine optimization (SEO) efforts so pretty permalinks are used here instead. We use the /%category%/%postname%/ permalink, which is probably the most popular.