Congrats to Chris Prillo on the launch of gada.be. Gada.be uses the interesting URL query syntax of terms in the host name, e.g.:

http://corpse.bride.gada.be/

http://corpse-bride.gada.be/

The syntax difference is: term1.term2 matches items on "term1 term2", whereas term1-term2 matches items on term1 AND term2.

With my kickitch sub-project here, I've been doing a lot of thinking about query terms in URLs. And, so I see gada.be's approach and am curious about if / in what ways it might prove to be more usable than alternatives in common use, e.g.:

http://example.com/?q=%22corpse+bride%22

http://example.com/?q=corpse+bride

I definitely like the idea of getting rid of the escaped quotes, but gada.be's version of a term like "web 2.0" is going to be lossy, e.g., web.2.0 translates back to "web 2 0".

Escaping and delimiting terms in text (and, then parsing them back out) is always pretty tricky, and there is usually some exception to whatever pattern is supposed to work for most things.

Coming soon here: a longer post from me on Query by Example as the theory of almost everything.