What is the rest of the text in the Google search URL?

For example, when I search "superuser" on Google, the first part of the URL is https://www.google.com/search?q=superuser, but there's also some extra text following behind it. When I remove the extra text and I go to https://www.google.com/search?q=superuser, I still get the same results.

What's the difference?


This blog post Google Search URL Parameters [Ultimate Guide] explains the parameters used by Google Search. They are shown on the images below (the images have been copied from the same link).

URL parameters are a set of values in the browser’s address bar after the website address. They start with a question mark and could go in a different order or be combined differently. Each URL parameter consists of a key=value pair. Multiple parameters are separated by the ampersand.

URL parameters are generated automatically, but you can tailor them to your specific needs using Google Search Console settings. They solve many technical problems, such as:

  1. User identification, working session facilitation, filling your online shopping cart.
  2. Tracking landing page conversions.
  3. Internal website search.
  4. Filter items in online stores.
  5. Sort items by price, brand, popularity.
  6. Pagination of directories and multi-page content.
  7. Displaying different page versions depending on the user language or country.

URL search URL search parameters

Content filtering options Content filtering parameters

Language and Geolocation Parameters

Language and Geolocation parameters

Time Attributes Time Attributes parameters