What is the best URL strategy to handle multiple search parameters and operators?

Posted by Jon Winstanley on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Jon Winstanley
Published on 2010-04-20T12:45:49Z Indexed on 2010/04/21 8:33 UTC
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url-rewriting

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url

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mod-rewrite

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url-parameters

Searching with mutltiple Parameters

In my app I would like to allow the user to do complex searches based on several parameters, using a simple syntax similar to the GMail functionality when a user can search for "in:inbox is:unread" etc.

However, GMail does a POST with this information and I would like the form to be a GET so that the information is in the URL of the search results page.

Therefore I need the parameters to be formatted in the URL.

Requirements:

Keep the URL as clean as possible
Avoid the use of invalid URL chars such as square brackets
Allow lots of search functionality
Have the ability to add more functions later.

I know StackOverflow allows the user to search by multiple tags in this way:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/c+sql

However, I'd like to also allow users to search with multiple additional parameters.

Initial Design

My design is currently to do use URLs such as these:

I intend to parse the URL after the search parameter, then decide how to construct my search query.

Has anyone seen URL parameters like this implemented well on a website?

If so, which do it best?

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