Query Requests

A query request is simply an HTTP GET request that returns XML.

Sample Query Request

Here is a request that looks up traffic rank data for yahoo.com:

http://awis.amazonaws.com/?
            AWSAccessKeyId=9876543212345123
            &Action=UrlInfo
            &ResponseGroup=Rank
            &SignatureMethod=HmacSHA1
            &SignatureVersion=2
            &Timestamp=2011-05-06T17%3A58%3A49.463Z
            &Url=yahoo.com
            &Signature=Wz2UT%2BtCYZghLBmqtkfEpg%2FqrK8%3D

See Common Request Parameters and Actions for descriptions of query parameters.

String to Sign

The Signature parameter is used to authenticate the request. It is calculated as the hash of the request's "string to sign" as described in Calculating Signatures. For the sample request above, the string to sign is:

GET\n
awis.amazonaws.com\n
/\n
AWSAccessKeyId=9876543212345123&Action=UrlInfo&ResponseGroup=Rank
&SignatureMethod=HmacSHA1&SignatureVersion=2
&Timestamp=2011-05-06T17%3A58%3A49.463Z&Url=yahoo.com

where \n represents a newline. The last three lines are actually a single line, with no newlines.