does querystring order matter?

for canonical urls

[httpwebwitch]

this sounds like a newb question. But it's vexing me because all I have are suspicions and no proof.

www.example.com/mypage.php/?page=1&sortby=name
www.example.com/mypage.php/?sortby=name&page=1

to a web server, the two URLs above are identical. My script does the same thing in either case and produces the same output.
But does a search engine see them as different URLs?

I hope not

But I'd appreciate an official comment or at least to know if anyone else shares my concern

[FalseDawn]

I'd be surprised if the 2 pages weren't treated as different URLs with duplicate content.

Otherwise, just imagine the complexity of the algorithm to determine that such URLs are the same. It's fairly easy with 2, but with 3,4,5 parameters?

You really should make sure they are in the same order, or better yet, use "clean" URLs with a rewrite.

[physics]

I have no proof either way but my guess is they could definitely be seen as dupes. It isn't very hard actually to take into account the unique parameters in a database backed spider program, regardless of if there are 2,3,4,5, etc... I've done this before. If I could do it so could Google, but that's not to say they have, and also it would be more difficult with the complexities they deal with (PageRank, zillions of pages, etc).