The following URL is appended to the front of the url that I have
defined for all of the "my favorite Links on the MSN My Home page.
Does any one have a clue as to why?   http://g.msn.com/0US!s9.31612_317621/MY.2023?

Hi, and Yes I do. 

See that "?"  at the end of the string there? That is the beginning of
a GET string, used for sending data using HTML, to a CGI or ASP
script/program. In this case, what it is sending is the link you are
clicking on.

Hypertext Markup Language
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_7.html#SEC7.5

Typically this is done with saved links so the owners can have more
details reports on what their site is being used for, and how often. I
use this same system on sites I run. If many people who use my site,
have in their favorite list, lets say... cnn.com, and 70% of them are
using that link on a regular basis, and they are gone from my site for
an extended period of time, then one could infer that others who use
cnn.com might be interested in my website, so I would look into
advertising on that site, or trying to attract the visitors of cnn.com
to my site, in some other manner. But, if many people have the link
there, but rarely use it, then I'm probably wasting my time attracting
cnn.com visitors.

There are of course many other ways to use the same data. For
instance, if many people using my website, have favorite links to a
gardening website, whether it is the same one or not, and use them
often, perhaps I should look into providing gardening information on
my website, or adding a forum so that visitors can talk to each other
about gardening. The list is quite long on what this information might
be used for. To be quite honest, most of the time it is not used at
all, (not saying MSN isn?t using it), because it takes a great deal of
resources to wisely assess traffic patterns on a website, for any
profitable action.

Once the CGI or ASP program gets your GET string, it reads the link
you are trying to go to, ticks something in a database, and then
forwards your browser to the page you originally wanted, when you
clicked the link. So, in normal circumstances, this delay is minute.

thanks, 

webadept-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by chet1abc-ga on 14 Feb 2004 10:06 PST

Thank you for your reply.  I should have mentioned that when that
happens. the link fails.  Al I get is "The page not found screen" so
the link is worthless.

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Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 17 Feb 2004 22:54 PST

Hi, just got back into town here and noticed your message. 

That would be "bad programming" on their part, probably some small
formating error. Dropping them a quick message will more than likely
see things fixed in a short time.

There's no way you can fix this on your end, since their asp program
is creating it.

thanks, 

webadept-ga