Decoding Google's querystring

Everytime we search our web companion google, our form from google's page is posted to another page handler. It was really hard to know what informations are obtained on process since it is doing a POST (probably to get few information that the users cannot set, plus the logging for querystring based request).



Google had many versions of the domain based on the browser's local language. But, we can change the results by altering the querystring.

For example, let's take a look at this sample query. I omitted the domain name.

http://www.google.com#hl=en&source=hp&q=ashigakari&oq=ashig&aq=1&aqi=g5&aql=&

gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1472l12540l0l14l12l4l0l0l1l2918l9404l1.3.1.9-3&fp=a578e5d014bca5dd

&biw=1280&bih=601

hl is the local language. en for English (also the default), tl for Tagalog (Philippines) and ja for Japanese. (Please refer to the localization code).

q (query)is the search term I used. We can see plus sign (+) for all the spaces included in the search term

aq (advanced query) is the zero-based index from the auto-suggest pulldown menu. From here, we can see that I clicked the pulldown menu item number 3 (was index 2).

aqi (advanced query index) is the last letter I hit with keyboard, and the number next to it was the order in which I entered the key. I typed ashig (g was the 5th character).

oq (original query), this is the word on the search box when search was performed.

I have no idea at present what is aql, as it is left blank.

Other querystring keys as well , gs_sm, gs_upl and fp. I guess that has something to do with location.


biw on other hand was my screen width (1280), and obviously  bih (601) was my actual browser resolution height(probably minus the menu, status bars, etc).



 How important are these things? With these under-rated informations, we can simply check the referrer site and if it came from Google, we can extract additional information to the user and make their user experience in your website even better.

Will update on other keys as soon as I figure them out. :)