What the url anchor do for baidu search engine?

Question

I am exposed to HTTP for several days, and today I encounter a problem as regards baidu search engine. Details as follow:

As I open http://www.baidu.com/ with desktop browser and type in some keyword, then press ENTER, the browser url displayed is something like http://www.baidu.com/#wd=stackoverflow&ie=utf-8 with stackoverflow as the search keyword.

Please notice the anchor #wd here. It seems pretty strange to me though, eg. as to Google for example, it would be something like https://www.google.com/search?q=stackoverflow without any anchor.

I use Fiddler (http://www.telerik.com/fiddler) to inspect the HTTP packet interaction, and curiously found something like GET /s?ie=utf-8&wd=linux HTTP/1.1 after several HTTP packet interaction.

In the whole process, the server only responses HTTP/1.1 200 OK and there is no stuff like HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily etc.

So how could it finally redirect to GET /s?ie=utf-8&wd=linux HTTP/1.1, what does the browser do to the anchor #wd?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The component of the url after the # sign is called the URL Fragment. It is not directly sent to the server as a part of the HTTP request (which is why you don't see it in Fiddler); it is only accessible by the JavaScript running on the page.

Some sites use URL fragments when they've used AJAX techniques to populate a page; see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2011/05/17/url-fragments-and-redirects-anchor-hash-missing.aspx for some discussion.