Reid - 7:05 am on Jul 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

/page.php?

will disallow any URL beginning with /page.php?

it will not disallow /page.php but it will disallow /page.php?id=2 /page.php?id=3 ect.

robots.txt is based on prefix-matching meaning that any url that matches up with the prefix /page.php? will be disallowed.

if you disallow /page.php
then it will disallow /page.php And /page.php?id=2 /page.php?id=3 ect because they all contain the prefix /page.php

googlebot can use the wildcard
/*.php will disallow all .php files in every directory because you are essentially saying
disallow: /(any text string).php
all files with a .php extension would be matched but files with a different extension such as .html would not match.

MSN and Inktomi do not allow the wildcard * in the disallow field but they do obey the user-agent: * (so does googlebot)