Amazon basic domain/service architecture

Question

Can someone explain what is happening in this URL? (I pulled it off a basic Amazon search and shortened the url= portion)

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=whatever

My mains questions are, where is the file extension of the requested page ? Is the requested page indeed nb_sb_noss ? What sort of server architecture allows this? Can I do this with PHP? What's the vocabulary I need to deal with this? Aaaah! :) Thanks!

P.S. Please retag, not sure what is applicable here

Answer 1

The URL is rewritten on the server. There is no file extension for the url (although there will obviously be scripts on the server in some language) and the parts of the url fit in to Amazon's business process somewhere, so may not be meaningful to the visitor.

You'd achieve this with mod_rewrite on apache, helicontech isapi_rewrite on iis6 or IIS Rewriting on iis7