What does it mean when you see things like:
?__utma=1.32168570.1258672608.1258672608.1259628772.2&__utmb=1.4.10.1259628772&
etc in
Here's a good link to explain them. They are cookies used by Google Analytics to track information on your website:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage#gajs
The __utma Cookie This cookie is what’s called a “persistent” cookie, as in, it never expires (technically, it does expire…in the year 2038…but for the sake of explanation, let’s pretend that it never expires, ever). This cookie keeps track of the number of times a visitor has been to the site pertaining to the cookie, when their first visit was, and when their last visit occurred. Google Analytics uses the information from this cookie to calculate things like Days and Visits to purchase.
The __utmb and __utmc Cookies The B and C cookies are brothers, working together to calculate how long a visit takes. __utmb takes a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor enters a site, while __utmc takes a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor leaves a site. __utmb expires at the end of the session. __utmc waits 30 minutes, and then it expires. You see, __utmc has no way of knowing when a user closes their browser or leaves a website, so it waits 30 minutes for another pageview to happen, and if it doesn’t, it expires.
[By Joe Teixeira]
Your browser don't support cookies. That's the reason you see it in the url.
In fact google use cookies __utma
, __utmb
, __utmc
, __utmz
to track information.
When cookies are disabled - browser pass this information throught URL as GET param.
They are URL parameters, they pass information back to the web server.
protocol://username:password@server:port?parameterList#anchorName
Example:
http://stackoverflow.com:80/page?param1=value1¶m2=value2
#anchorName
will skip you to a certain part of an HTML pageparameterList
portion is also called the queryprotocol
portion is also called the schemeusername:password
part can be ommittedport
will default to 80 if the protocol
is HTTP and the port
is not specifiedprotocol
in a web browser, it will default to HTTP.There is a much more detailed description from what I gave in RFC 3986: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax.
It is related to google analytics... it's used for their tracking. Although I suspect Brian's answer answers what you were really asking...