Lars Pind

internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship

Lars Pind - internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship
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Amazon does speaking URLs

October 25, 2006 · 6 comments

See this URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Instant-Italian-Elisabeth/dp/0071421157/.

When did they start doing that? They were always the grand master of convoluted URLs. And now speaking URLs? Nice. Now I just wish they cut out all that session crap from the URL.

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6 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Chris Obdam // Oct 25, 2006 at 01:30 PM

    The title part of the URL can be replaced with everything, so the session part can never be removed. http://www.amazon.com/pinds/dp/0071421157/. Redirects to the same page.

  • 2 Lars Pind // Oct 25, 2006 at 01:34 PM

    By "session part" I was referring to all the crap they add to the URLs *after* what I copied above. If you click on the link above, and then click on any link on that page, it'll have a bunch of stuff added. That stuff is really ugly, and by default, if you copy-paste a URL from their site, you'll still get all that uglyness.

  • 3 Jonas // Oct 26, 2006 at 10:22 AM

    Uglyness prevails, also in the architecture of URLs.

  • 4 Shannon // Oct 28, 2006 at 02:29 PM

    How do del.icio.us and flickr keep their urls nice and tidy?

  • 5 Jarkko // Nov 02, 2006 at 12:47 PM

    The crap there actually serves an important purpose for them. In this year's Reboot Jesse James Garrett demonstrated how the url's reflect which link was clicked on which page, in which part of the page etc. That way Amazon can track their users on a much more granular level. I, too, hate the obscure url's but have a lot higher tolerance for them (only in this case, not generally) after the presentation. I _think_ it would be possible to do the tracking using javascript (like "Crazyegg":http://www.crazyegg.com does), but I guess it's just too heavy for the amount of page loads Amazon.com serves.

  • 6 chakpak // Nov 13, 2006 at 05:38 PM

    This is supposed to give better search engine rankings.