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Comment by jonpaul | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone find it a bit ironic that these page URLs are NOT search engine friendly? Just a long string id... seriously Google? Maybe not irony because they own the search engine... but still makes you scratch your head wondering why.

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IIRC, people got upset with Google Profiles that your Gmail address was exposed from the URL (eg. profiles.google.com/dave would lead to dave@gmail.com). The URLs are thus anonymized to stop that leakage.

They could/should have a system up for registering company names though.

In what respect are they not "search engine friendly"? Being human-readable or slugged doesn't necessarily make URLs more search engine friendly, nor does it necessarily improve their rank:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-u...

It's my understanding that making your URLs human friendly makes them more search engine friendly IF the url contains relevant keywords to the page. The link you provided is just about dynamic vs static urls, which is not what I'm referring to.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

Whether or not they're more search engine friendly, if you're looking for Japanese Astrophysics Vocabulary you're more likely to click `/japanese-astrophysics-vocab.html` than `/p?id=47`

That's true if you actually read and interpret the URL (I'd guess that most users don't.) But regardless, I was commenting on the earlier complaint that the URLs aren't "search engine friendly", not that they're not "user friendly." That's all I was trying to address.

Personally the first one would be a red flag for me and i'd be suspicious of autogenerated content. I'd be more likely to go with the second. But from a google results page, the summary is the part i pay the most attention to.

I think it helps a lot in situations where you can't link. TV, radio, word of mouth etc. Currently you would have to tell people to search for your page rather than get them to remember a short /brand

Same with the extensions, for example: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejnkaeblpdcamcioii...

I don't understand why.

For developers, the extension IDs are actually somewhat important. Plus, handling canonical URLs in a massive store could be a bit hairy (Android Market does it because all developers declare their own IDs, Chrome extension IDs are made by Chrome itself.)

That's actually Icelandic.

I suspect that Google will eventually do what Facebook did, and allow you to choose your own URL.

With FB a standard profile link looks like facebook.com/profile.php?id=xxxxxxxx but can be changed to facebook.com/your.name.here

I'm hoping it's something like:

google.com/+yournamehere

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