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To be specific, it's just the # hack, or fragment hack if you like. The bang leading the fragment is a Google-specific thing to help the Googlebot crawl your content.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3009380/whats-the-shebang...

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<strike>No, timb was referring to HTML5 history api. It makes possible to alter the path component of a URL by javascript, eliminating the need for # hack. Try browsing repositories on github with WebKit-based browser to see a real world example.</strike> (sorry for my misreading)

And raganwald was referring to the '#!' hack, since it's really just the '#' hack. He wasn't addressing the history api.

However all those IE users out there would not have that API. I remembered that facebook's starting to use that API already.

The solution with "mangled" URL seems to force a reload on every new request to lifehacker as well. Just like what Facebook did with the hash-reload.

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