ok latley i have been seeing urls like http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...&category=47254 and i knoticed the .dll in it. do you think thats a real dll or just like a file of like java script or something with a dll extention? i have also seen urls with exe?something in them and i dont know why anyone would have an exe file that wasent a real program.... anyway just something sorta strange i knoticed.

i think it is perl... although maybe not... though im just pretty sure its perl!

I really don't know but I would guess that it's an exe on server side and everything you type behind the exe will be passed to it as command line parameters.
Like this:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\notepad.exe myfile.txt
Only that it's over Internet instead of on a local disk. But as I already said, I only guess.

I think the key part is the cgi. Don't most websites have the executables that they run in the cgi_bin folder? I think the DLL is probably is just a binary that never gets copied to your computer; I t could be written in any language, including C++. Yeah, and I think that the stuff afterward was that command line arguments (what else could it be?). DLLs can take command line arguments.

I think the reason they did it was searching is something that interpreted languages like JavaScript really suck at, so they wanted to put the search in a binaryto speed it up.

I'm not totally sure so don't take me too seriously.

Don't worry THM, you're right as rain. It's CGI. It runs on the server and spits things back to you.