Do search engines prefer directories, .htm, .html...?

Attempting to structure site to please search engines AND visitors

[ThatAdamGuy]

My site encompasses a handful of different themes that relate to a broad topic, and for the most part, I have www.mysite.com/topicname/ as the URL, with a median of probably 5 pages within each topic (my /photography section has over 1000 pages!).

Via a very well-respected script, I'm creating a mini-amazon.com-store (populated with material related to my site, of course!), and using mod rewrite to make /cgi-bin/script.pl?gooblygook=blah&blah=moreblah into mysite.com/amz/nice/directories

I have the option to easily make these nicer URL's appear as:
/amz/page or
/amz/page.htm or
/amz/page.whatever

So here are my questions:
Do the search engines care? Would my visitors (who would have the option to bookmark any of these pages) have any reason to care? Should I care? :D

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this :)

[edited by: pageoneresults at 2:37 pm (utc) on June 29, 2003]
[edit reason] Just delinked example. [/edit]

[takagi]

For an HTML file, Google doesn't care if there is a file extension or not. Maybe some exotic browsers will prefer the '.htm' or '.html' as extension.

For files in MS Word, Excel, images, PDFs etc. I would certainly add the right extension.

[WebDevInfo]

No, the SEs don't care if it ends in page.htm, page.html, default.htm, etc.

Providing it doesn't have ampersands (&) or question marks in them (except with Google), you're sound :)