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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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.
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.
Uglyness prevails, also in the architecture of URLs.
How do del.icio.us and flickr keep their urls nice and tidy?
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.
This is supposed to give better search engine rankings.
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