You might say that technically they could have the same back-end, but the web is flexible - just about any URL scheme could resolve to the same back-end. The difference is that the first is honest and the second one goes out of its way to hide what it does.
Uh, yes there is. http://www.somesite.com/index.html?q=foo is obviously a search (right down to the choice if q for query), but http://www.somesite.com/buy_foo_now.html does not look like one.
You might say that technically they could have the same back-end, but the web is flexible - just about any URL scheme could resolve to the same back-end. The difference is that the first is honest and the second one goes out of its way to hide what it does.