Asa Dotzler: A Simple Google News Search

I keep an eye on Google News results for "firefox". Today I noticed that the URL for that search was crazy long.

https://www.google.com/search?&hl;=en≷=us&tbm;=nws&btnmeta;_news_search=1&q;=firefox#q=firefox&hl;=en&safe;=off≷=us&tbas;=0&tbm;=nws&source;=lnt&tbs;=sbd:1&sa;=X&ei;=fwP6TprKDcariALLtpiTDQ&ved;=0CCAQpwUoAQ&bav;=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp;=2758f09f54f048c8&biw;=1366&bih;=664

After a couple of seconds of playing around with it, I determined that the actually useful to me bits made a much smaller string.

https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox&tbm;=nws&tbs;=sbd:1

That is, trimming the URL down to the shorter string returned the same search results as the longer string. So, there are only tree pieces of information, three parameters required to get me the results I'm after. There's the search term, that it's a news search, and the sort order. The language and geography and safe browsing setting are obvious (though they don't impact the results, so why carry them,) but what are the rest of these parameters?

btnmeta_news_search=1
tbas=0
source=lnt
sa=X
ei=fwP6TprKDcariALLtpiTDQ
ved=0CCAQpwUoAQ
bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb
fp=2758f09f54f048c8
biw=1366
bih=664

If you're a Google News developer and you've got a minute, maybe you can satisfy my curiosity.