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copied!<p>One thing to mention on the SEO front:</p> <p>As a lot of the "results" pages will be linking through to the same content, there are a couple of advantages to appearing* to have different URLs for these pages:</p> <ol> <li>Some search engines get cross if you appear to have duplicate content on the site, or if there's the possiblity for almost infinite lists.</li> <li>Analysing traffic flow.</li> </ol> <p>So for point 1, as an example, you'll notice that SO has numberous ways of finding questions, including:</p> <ol> <li>On the home page</li> <li>Through /questions</li> <li>Through /tags</li> <li>Through /unanswered</li> <li>Through /feeds</li> <li>Through /search</li> </ol> <p>If you take a look at the robots.txt for SO, you'll see that spiders are not allowed to visit (among other things):</p> <pre><code>Disallow: /tags Disallow: /unanswered Disallow: /search Disallow: /feeds Disallow: /questions/tagged </code></pre> <p>So the search engine should only find <strong>one</strong> route to the content rather than three or four.</p> <p>Having them all go through the same page doesn't allow you to filter like this. Ideally you want the search engine to index the list of Cities and Tags, but you only need it to index the actual details once - say from the A to Z list.</p> <p>For point 2, when analysing your site traffic, it will be a lot easier to see how people are using your site if the URLs are meaningful, and the results aren't hidden in the form header - many decent stats packages allow you to report on query string values, or if you have "nice" urls, this is even easier. Having this sort of information will also make selling advertising easier if that's what's you're interested in.</p> <p>Finally, as I mentioned in the comments to other responses, users may well want to bookmark a particular search - having the query baked into the URL one way or another (query strings or rewritten url) is the simiplist way to allow this.</p> <p>*I say "appearing" because as others have pointed out, URL rewriting would enable this without actually having different pages on the server.</p>

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