my second question may or may not be a little more complicated, or at least require a longer answer. in the URLs, the quotation mark is represented by %22 and the plus sign is represented by %2B. so, is there a list of “codes” to represent symbols like this on Google? and are they used anywhere else, or just on Google? i experimented some and found that 10 followed by any alphanumerical character turned up that character in the search, but i figured it’d be easier to take advantage of other people’s knowledge about this than to spen hours searching for different numbers along with the percent sign.
Regarding %22 = " and %2B = +, the 22 and 2B are hexadecimal representations of the ASCII code for those characters. ASCII Character Map (Adobe format)
The percent sign is the escape character that notifies the 'puter that the next two characters are hexadecinal values.
The linked table shows four columns. The first is the decimal value of the character. The second is the image of the character (assuming a “standard” Latin typeface and without getting in to alternative character sets). The third column is the binary value of the character, and the fourth column is the hexadecimal representation.
This code may be tough to crack. When I searched for “lyrics” with Google, I got something rather different. Here’s your result, followed by my result:
The “btnG” is simple enough - “Google Search” is the name of the button I picked. I can’t explain why the encodings are different, though - “ISO 8859-1” vs “UTF-8”.
But also, none of the searches I ran stuck that little “lr=” in. I don’t know what it could be.
The “lr” parameter is used to restrict the language of pages. With “lr=lang_de”, Google will only search German pages, for example. “lr=” probably gets added due to a preference setting that does not restrict the language.
This is just a WAG but maybe that’s browser dependent. In IE (at least in 6.0) under Tools - Internet Options - Advanced tab, in the browser section there’s an option “Always send URLs as UTF-8”. Maybe it changes depending on whether or not that option is checked?