What is the purpose of #! in an url

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What's the shebang (#!) in Facebook and new Twitter URLs for?

This question may have been asked before so bear with me. #! (pound exclamation) is not a great search term neither on this site nor on google.

So anyway, I'm noticing a lot of facebook urls with these two characters in them. What is it used for?

I've seen an answer to this here on SO... can't find it now though. — aioobe, Nov 13 '10 at 22:44
#! is usually called _shebang_. This helps a lot when searching about it! You can check this question, as it's an exact duplicate : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3009380/whats-the-shebang-in-facebook-and-new-twitter-urls-for — Vincent Savard, Nov 13 '10 at 22:45
How can this both be offtopic and be an exact duplicate of a question with over 100 upvotes? — Mark Byers, Nov 13 '10 at 22:47
Thanks everyone. I thought I had seen that question before too but I obviously failed to search for *shebang*. — Klaus Byskov Pedersen, Nov 13 '10 at 22:51

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

2

This should explain it:

It boils down to making AJAX-sites crawlable.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

Community

answered Nov 13 '10 at 22:47

aioobe

As of October 14, 2015, Google has deprecated the technique: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html – Trenton Dec 14 '15 at 23:55

1 Answers1