OT No wonder we're running out of numbers.

OT, sort of .

All I wanted to do was read a newspaper column and this is typical of the link they send me 5 days a week. No wonder we are running out of numbers. Well this is not truly OT because we all need numbers to do home repairs and the greater the demand, for silly things like this, the higher their price will be.

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" Do they really need so many letters and numbers given that there are only 7 billion people in the world and a few billion webpages?

Reply to
mm
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I searched a few million of the few billion webpages and found this:

"When you see strings of apparently random letters/numbers in a URL it's of ten for security purposes...Basically when the page is created the site sof tware creates a random string of characters and inserts it into the URL. Th is keeps people from guessing where the page is located on the server."

I also read that the longer the URL is, the lower down on the rankings of search engines it becomes. I can't think of a reason why, but maybe the Pos t doesn't want the article to be easily found via a Google search and only wa nts people accessing it via an "invitation" from them.

I'm%20just%20guessing%20based%20on%20some%20light%20reading?disclaim_er=I %20could%20be%20wrong%20;-)

Reply to
DerbyDad03

The link encodes the web page, the identity of the person to who it was sent (so they can track to see how you came to the site and where you went once you got there) plus (probably) the identity of the agency offering the link to you.

Can you spell "metadata"? :>

Reply to
Don Y

I'll try ... M E T A DA ! TA TA for now. John T.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

Reply to
hubops

FAIL... one too many TA's. [g]

Reply to
RonNNN

wELL thank you don and derby. I was ranting and didnt' really expectd an answer, so this is gravy.

As to invitation, the printed newspaper each day gives the url to get the daily email, which then has me go to the web. And it's only been 3 days, but so far, I don't like reading it on the web, compared to the newspaper.

Carolyn Hax has the best advice column I've ever read. Hwever on two occaisions, I thought she was wrong, really really wrong, and I thought reading it online woudl make it easier to argue with her. The first time I know she got about 3000 emails, so I wasn't t he only one to disagree, and I'm sure they said anything I could have thought of.

I only buy the paper 2 or 3 days a week.

Reply to
Micky

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