What does __utma mean?

Question

What does it mean when you see things like:

?__utma=1.32168570.1258672608.1258672608.1259628772.2&__utmb=1.4.10.1259628772&

etc in

Answer 1

They are URL parameters, they pass information back to the web server.

protocol://username:password@server:port?parameterList#anchorName

Example:

http://stackoverflow.com:80/page?param1=value1¶m2=value2

• The #anchorName will skip you to a certain part of an HTML page
• The parameterList portion is also called the query
• The protocol portion is also called the scheme
• The username:password part can be ommitted
• The port will default to 80 if the protocol is HTTP and the port is not specified
• If you don't specify the protocol in a web browser, it will default to HTTP.
• You will often want to have a single page do multiple things. This is accomplished by accepting different parameters. These parameters will typically pass information to the server which will modify how the next page is displayed, or how another action is performed on the server
• Sometimes URL parameters are replaced with nice looking URL paths. This is accomplished with newer web frameworks like ASP .NET MVC, Django, Ruby on Rails, etc...

There is a much more detailed description from what I gave in RFC 3986: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax.