what does & mean in this case?

Question

i know that its creating a reference in other cases. but what happens here?

$crawler = &new MyCrawler();

Answer 1

It creates an instance of MyCrawler and passes the reference for that instance into $crawler. In PHP5 this is assumed so the use of the & is deprecated.

EDIT: It took me a minute to find this:

Object References (the Ampersand)

Answer 2

That is deprecated per the PHP documentation