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Comment by worble | Hacker News Reader

>The rest, `item?id=24156986`, is meaningless to a human

Removing Url's is throwing the baby out with the bathwater though. Take Stack Overflow for an example:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536/vue-test-utils-...

The only thing you need to actually get to the question is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53302536, but they intentionally add an extra human readable section for laypeople.

If google actually cared about making the internet a better place, they would simply rank human readable urls higher than non-human readable ones.

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But this human readable section of the URL is primarily useful for reading outside the address bar, before you've loaded the page.

Eg. if someone pasted you the URL, you can kind of get an idea of what it's about by reading the URL in your instant messenger or something. Once you've loaded the page and the URL is displayed in your address bar, you'd be looking at the page itself to understand it rather than your address bar.

That extra human readable section is not added for humans. It’s added for SEO. That is, for Google.

> That extra human readable section is not added for humans. It’s added for SEO. That is, for Google.

It is indeed for humans. After all, the whole purpose of SEO is to show up on the 1st or 2nd SRP for web searches conducted by humans.

Not for humans browsing the site currently (which is the distinction that matters)

It's more complex than that. Google upweights it because text in the URL is assumed to be significant to the user. So it's a bit of both, really.

It would be a shame if URL text loses its SEO value because it's getting hidden. Slugs in the url are human-friendly and should be encouraged.

The URL structure is usually mirrored on the actual website by way of clickable breadcrumbs or as navigational information architecture.

People understand slashes indicate folders and directories, even though database-driven CMSes do not use folder structures. They can figure out that they can go one level from from "example.com/cars/toyota" by removing the "/toyota"

I don’t agree with the breadcrumb mirroring. It’s orthogonal. You can have breadcrumb or not and it wouldn’t matter to the user if it mirrors the url or not.

These are for SEO not for users navigating on the page. It wouldn’t be practical for the user to read information there as they are navigating the page anyway.

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