Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Lolu chungechunge lwabekwa kunqolobane. Uyacelwa ubuze umbuzo omusha uma udinga usizo.

phishing url

more options

How would a browser treat a URL with reserve characters, specifically the forward slash?

sample link: https://amazon .com/prime_day_deals/xyz .info

Please note, I added a space before the dot.

Would this link work, in sending the traffic to xyz .info as opposed to the legit amazon.com?

How would a browser treat a URL with reserve characters, specifically the forward slash? sample link: https://amazon .com/prime_day_deals/xyz .info Please note, I added a space before the dot. Would this link work, in sending the traffic to xyz .info as opposed to the legit amazon.com?

All Replies (1)

more options

A browser breaks the URL into parts:

(1) Protocol (http or https) -- this specifies how to connect

(2) Host name (in your example, amazon.com) -- this is the server to look up and connect to

(3) Path and Search (everything after the host name up to but not including #) -- this part is sent as a whole to the web server for interpretation (any part after a hash character (#) is considered by the browser after the page is returned)

Some sites do have outbound link forwarders, like Google and Facebook. For example, if you right-click > Copy Link Location on a Google search result, the URL looks like this:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjCq6rBqqjsAhWhIDQIHfRtBNMQFjABegQIAhAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mozilla.org%2Fen-US%2Ffirefox%2F&usg=AOvVaw1aIQZ3syQXuPwS0XmIL8lb

That feeds into a script on Google's server to record your click and redirect you to the address in the url= section of the URL.

But in your example, if /prime_day_deals/ doesn't feed into a redirecting script, it's more likely you'll get a page not found error.