Gmail, the popular email service, has a URL parameter that can be used to control how search engines rank your email. The parameter is shva=1. This value tells Gmail to use the most recent version of the Google search engine results page (SERP) when displaying your email. If you have this value set to 1, Gmail will only show results from Google’s latest search engine, rather than from older versions of the SERP.
If you aren’t a programmer you might have never thought about all that stuff in the URL when you visit Gmail, but after years of noticing this, I finally decided to look it up. Turns out it actually does stand for something.
What the shva=1 Parameter Means
According to Google engineer Mike Sego:
To further explain…
Once you login to Gmail, their servers need to make sure that you’re actually logged in, and adding this parameter tells the Gmail web application that you’re logged in, so the Gmail App doesn’t need to reload and re-check the authentication. Note: while testing we noticed that sometimes Gmail ignores this parameter, and sometimes it uses it.
And just to give you even more useless information…
The #inbox parameter that you can see in the location bar tells Gmail which label to load. Go ahead, change #inbox to #drafts and you’ll see that the page doesn’t completely reload, but just acts as if you had clicked on the Drafts label.
You can even use the URL bar to change to custom labels that you’ve created, and Gmail will act as if you searched. For example, using #label/Books instead of #inbox will tell Gmail to show anything with the label of Books.
And now you know a completely useless, but somewhat interesting fact.
