百度搜索参数的含义

The URL of a search engine result page usually looks messy but contains a lot of information. You look at them every day but you may not know which parameter represents what. It is not your fault, as obviously search engineers deliberately make them hard to read.

But if that could make SEOs give up, I guess there would never have been a career called SEO. Search Engine Land has a post titled “Google Power User Tips: SERP URL Parameters“, contributed by Stephen Spencer back in Sep 2010; Blue Glass also has a post on the same topic: Google Search URL Parameters – Query String Anatomy; Joost de Valk created a cheat sheet on Google search URL parameters, which you can download here.

So today I’d like to build a list of the URL parameters of Baidu. I digged, tested, and brainstormed. I hope it can be the most complete one.

A typical URL of Baidu’s result page looks like this:

http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=SEO&rsv_spt=1&rsv_bp=0&ie=utf-8&tn=baiduhome_pg&inputT=11987

“s?” here means someone has done a search; “&” is used to separate the parameters. And other parameters the link above includes are:

wd: keyword you search for. Very occasionally it is replaced by “word”;

rsv_spt: login status. “1” means the search is conducted by a logged-in user; “3” means the searcher doesn’t log in;

rsv_bp: where you do the search. “0” means it is done from Baidu’s homepage; “1” means from top search box of the result page; “2” means from the bottom search box of the result page;

ie: query encoding. The default value is gb2312;

tn: this is a referral tag. “baiduhome_pg” means Baidu homepage; “sitehao123” means the referrer is hao123.com;

inputT: input time by the millisecond;

Other parameters also include:

bs: previous search query;

pn：pagination of the result page, starting from 0;

rn：number of results per page, with the default value of 10；

cl：search type, with 3 representing web search, 2 for image search and news search；

lm：period filter for results by the day. For example lm=7 means results of the past seven days;

ct：languages, with 0 for all languages, 1 for simplified Chinese, and 2 for traditional Chinese；

oq：original search query for related searches. For example you searched “SEO” then clicked on one of the related searches like “SEO services”, then the value of “oq” is “SEO”;

rsp：ordinal number of the suggested queries for related search, starting from 0;

f：search type. f=8 means a normal search (input and search), f=3 for the dropdown suggestion list of the search box and f=1 means a related search.

So the above parameters are all the ones that my colleagues, friends and I collected and studied.

You know what? I lied. The title says “The Complete List of Baidu Search URL Parameters”, but actually I have no idea if it is complete, as there is not an official version from Baidu.