I'm writing an extension for firefox. Using dom.location to keep track of visited search results pages, i'm getting this url http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=hi&aq=f&aqi=&oq=&fp=642c18fb4411ca2e . If you click it, the google search results for "hi" should come up. You'll know that from the title bar - because the rest of the page won't load. This happens with any google search. Oddly enough, if you cut part of it off, so say, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=hi - it works! But Googling "hi" myself does give me a longish URL - http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=hi&aq=f&aqi=&oq=&fp=db658cc5049dc510 . I know for a fact that the first time that URL was visited, the page loaded, I did it myself.

Can anyone make reason out of this?

I just tried my experiment again, this time saving the original URL in the location bar. It turns out, dom.location.href is giving a different value. How is this happening?

Original:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=hi&aq=f&aqi=&oq=&fp=642c18fb4411ca2e

dom.location.href
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=hi&aq=f&aqi=&oq=&fp=642c18fb4411ca2e

window.addEventListener("load", function() { myExtension.init(); }, false);

var myExtension = {
  init: function() {
    var appcontent = document.getElementById("appcontent");   // browser
    if(appcontent)
      appcontent.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", myExtension.onPageLoad, true);
    var messagepane = document.getElementById("messagepane"); // mail
    if(messagepane)
      messagepane.addEventListener("load", function () { myExtension.onPageLoad(); }, true);
  },

  onPageLoad: function(aEvent) {
    var doc = aEvent.originalTarget; // doc is document that triggered "onload" event
    // do something with the loaded page.
    // doc.location is a Location object (see below for a link).
    // You can use it to make your code executed on certain pages only.


var url = doc.location.href;

if (url.match(/(?:p|q)(?:=)([^%]*)/)) {alert("MATCH" + url);resultsPages.push(url);} else {alert(url);
  }
}

This snippet comes directly from Mozilla with the matching and alerts my own. I apologize for not posting the code earlier.