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What does the double slash mean in URLs?

I'm working on a mod_rewrite URL structure as follows:

http://example.com/search/filter1/filter2/filter3/filter4

There are some conditions where it is OK for the first attribute to be blank, but i want to keep the other attributes in the same position. (Otherwise I can't assume that the attribute in the second position represents what I want it to represent.) However this results in some URLs like this:

http://example.com/search//filter2/filter3/filter4

This seems to work in all browsers I've tested (Chrome,Firefox,IE9,IE compatible) and I'm not seeing any errors on the server side, so I can't think of any problems in using it. But it just looks wrong and weird to me and I'm not used to seeing it. Are there any potential downsides to using a structure that encourages URLs like this, or any major reasons no one seems to use it? (Everything I search in Google assumes I'm talking about the two slashes after http:)