Bioshock Infinite: Premium Edition -Xbox 360

The example about Amazon is inaccurate.

Here is an Amazon URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Bioshock-Infinite-Premium-Edition-Xbox...

Is it completely clean? Nope. It contains a lot of information that feed into the backend, but the core URL is this:

http://www.amazon.com/Bioshock-Infinite-Premium-Edition-Xbox...

This URL will take you to the correct page, every time, and it doesn't take a genius to figure this out. It also doesn't take a genius to figure out what this page is about before you even paste the link into your browser. By putting the human-relevant portion of the URL as far forward as possible it's able to accomplish both priorities: giving the machine as much information as possible, and giving the human as much information as possible.

The trick here is that "Bioshock-Infinite-Premium-Edition-Xbox-360" is entirely superfluous. It is entirely there for SEO and human readability purposes. This URL works just fine and leads to the same place:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009PJ9L3Y/

Amazon isn't blind to these issues. So sure, you can take this very last URL and try to make a point about obfuscated URLs, but that's not what's actually in use at Amazon. It seems odd to pick them as an example when they're not even a violator.

[edit] It looks like HN truncates long URLs for display, which only goes further to prove the point.

SEO friendly: yes, human friendly: no

Sure, the URL

http://www.amazon.com/Bioshock-Infinite-Premium-Edition-Xbox...

leads to the Bioshock article, but so does

http://www.amazon.com/flux-compensator/dp/B009PJ9L3Y/

or

http://www.amazon.com/hackers-and-painters/dp/B009PJ9L3Y/

In my opinion the only reason for the slug is SEO, everything else is a side effect which I personally find borderline dangerous.

BTW stackoverflow.com URLs work the same way.