5 ms·
>(Gawker also changed its story, but proof of the original headline is still in the URL) You can put anything in the URL you like, as long as the number matche
by uiri 14y ago
>(Gawker also changed its story, but proof of the original headline is still in the URL)
You can put anything in the URL you like, as long as the number matches and it passes whatever regular expression gawker runs on those URLs, it will point to the right news story. Hardly conclusive proof that gawker changed the headline when someone can do something like http://gawker.com/5968551/ryan-lanza-is-a-cold-blooded-murderer http://gawker.com/5968551/ryan-lanza-is-a-cold-blooded-murde... and the URL bar doesn't even change to reflect the original title.
- HeyImAlex 14y agoEither way, they say what they ammended the title from at the bottom of the post.
- philmcc 14y agoWell, I think the idea is that the link Gawker released initially was the one that got passed around the most and posted on facebook page, twitter, etc. ( I know I posted it. ) As a result, I believe that would also be the URL that ranks highest in a Google search. Regardless of what text gets added after the number so to an extent, for popular posts, whichever title Gawker releases first will be set in stone. I'm not very familiar with regexes so I don't really understand why they would need one on the URL. It seems you can drop the string part of that "suffix" altogether.
- ReidZB 14y agoPurely SEO. Articles being identified by number is much cleaner programming-wise, but search engines like it when URLs have text in them to index against. It's also good for readability of URLs in general, really.