Why does the term 'obidos' seem to form part of most Amazon pages? An
example is http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/283155/002-7252904-4889602.
Does obidos have a meaning (I know about the town in Portugal...)

Hi gw3tja,

What is this ubiquitous "obidos" of Amazon.com fame? The answer can be
found in Wikipedia's entry for "Amazon.com":

"Some of the words in Amazon.com URLs are nods to the Amazon River and
Brazil: obidos comes from Óbidos, the meeting place of the Amazon's
tributaries; varzea is Portuguese (Brazil's main language) for a
forest flooded after heavy rains, as parts of the Amazon forest are;
gp is short for Gurupa, a region in northeastern Brazil near the mouth
of the Amazon."
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Trivia >

A September 2002 post titled "The Mystery of Obidos" on a weblog
called "Deadprogrammer's Cafe" notes that the Amazon/obidos question
was a subject of debate on Usenet. Here's how some interpreted
"obidos":

- Castle near Lisbon
- OBI (Wan Kenobi) + DOS (Disk Operating System)
- 'OBI' = Object Broker Interface

The blogger goes on to quote a Livejournal user who had this to say:

"I worked at Amazon for a couple of years, and can mostly answer that.

"Obidos is the area where the Amazon is "concentrated" - it narrows to
a point about a mile wide and a couple hundred feet deep. It's the
chokepoint of the Amazon. A wry sense of humor turned that to the
naming scheme.

"Amazon wrote their own web serving environment because the selection
of scripting/webcontrol languages when they got started was so lousy.
They had to call it something, so obidos it was. :)"

< http://www.deadprogrammer.com/?m=200209&paged=2 >
 
You may also be interested in this Oct. 30, 2005 post by blogger Jason
Diamond in which he laments an apparent disappearance of "obidos" from
Amazon's URLs:

< http://jason.diamond.name/weblog/2005/10/30/navigating-the-amazon >

Finally, you may want to check out a discussion called "What Exactly
Are Obidos?" that took place in a forum on the Fog Creek software
website:

<http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=48202>

The following search string was successful in finding your answer:

amazon url obidos

All the best!

Emjay-ga

Thanks for a very comprehensive answer, which answers something I have
puzzled about on and off for several years. The only thing that
surprises me is that my own attempts to search Google for "obidos"
produced no relevant results. Whereas if you search for "g3tja" (my
other alias) you will know find a trail of forums that I have visited.

Thanks again for your excellent answer.

The Óbidos in Brazil/Brasil is, of course, named after the Óbidos in Portugal.

Try googling: Óbidos -amazon.

http://en.cm-obidos.pt/

It is near my parents hometown.

Thank you, Nelson, Small world, eh?
Richard (gw3tja)