/exec/obidos/

[pne]

From the "Learn a new thing every day" department:

Did you know that the ubiquitous "obidos" in Amazon URLs comes from the town Óbidos in Brazil, located at the narrowest and swiftest part of the Amazon River? Its name, in turn, derives ultimately from the Latin word oppidum for a citadel or fortified city.

"varzea" is also related to the Amazon River.

Comments

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that, but I have always wondered...

[angharad.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'm glad you told us!

hmmm

[(Anonymous)]

Obidos is the name of the gigantic binary that runs on top of a whole bunch of Apache Webservers designed to serve you up all of those amazon web pages. It used to be written in C, but has most likely migrated to C++ now. Everytime anybody makes a change to the software behind amazon, they have to recompile obidos. /exec/obidos means send stuff to obidos for processing. Let's look at the following:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002KVUKM/

The part before the /-/ refers to an action. The action can be translated as as send "B0002KVUKM" to the commands located in /tg/detail/. tg = 'template generator' and detail refers to a product 'detail' page. The code number that was sent is called an ASIN or Amazon Standard Item Number. Basically the whole URL says display the product detail page for B0002KVUKM. ASINs used to simply be ISBNs when Amazon just sold books, but now they refer to other codes too.