First, let’s come to understanding about how fragment identifiers are currently being used on the web, prepared for the W3C Tag by Google’s T.V. Raman.

Now back to the Google Webmaster blog proposal:

In summary, starting with a stateful URL such as
http://example.com/dictionary.html#AJAX , it could be available to both crawlers and users as
http://example.com/dictionary.html#!AJAX which could be crawled as
http://example.com/dictionary.html?escaped_fragment=AJAX which in turn would be shown to users and accessed as
http://example.com/dictionary.html#!AJAX

0_o

I’m sure the SEO folks love this proposal but it seems like there are larger Web Architecture issues here that this proposal violates.

Language Log has also posted several other entries on this topic worth reading:

• Googlinguistics: the good, the bad, and the ugly
• Google recall (They stole his mind,now he wants it back.)
• More arithmetic problems at Google
• Google frequency agen (um, agin) (oops, again)
• Google-sampling: avoiding pseudo-text in cyberspace