Question marks in a URL

How do SE's read them?

[webboy1]

Hi,

We have been having a debate in the office as to how search engines read URLs that contain Question marks e.g. www.mysite.com/index.asp?variable=something.

We are not sure if search engines will be able to read this link. Will it just avoid it? or will it read everything before the Question mark?

Any comments, opinions, facts on this would be more than appreciated.

Regards
Webboy

[gsx]

Google will read it fine, as long as it is 'hard' linked from a HTML page with the variables in tact as a standard <a href> tag. But, too long a URL (inc vars) and Google ignores it.

FAST/ATW will also read some links like that.

Most other engines ignore anything with a '?'. Inktomi can read them if you submit each page for Pay for Inclusion, as can FAST and Teoma, but will not index them for free. It is a fear of being caught in an endless loop or high bandwidth issues that stops some engines from indexing these.