Really long URLs and Google

Does anyone know if Google looks at the length of a URL when indexing it or giving it its relevence? If I have a URL that is, say, 400 characters long versus 50 characters long; will it make any kind of different to the positioning in search engines?

I ask this because I have a choice in passing data from one page to the next for a project - I can either store the data in a database with an index key as a parameter, or I can tack the data onto the URL for each subsequent page clicked on. If I do it without the database, the URL will grow very quickly and contain actual URLs to pages in the history that took them to where they are. Would having a really long URL or multiple web addresses effect the indexing of the pages when the spiders traverse through the pages?

The difference would be:

http://www.mysite.com/thisparm-data/...-data/key=nnnn

versus

http://www.mysite.com/thisparm-data/thatparm-data/h1-http:~~www.mysite.com~thisparm-data~thatparm-data~n1-search1/n1-searchx/h2-http:~~www.mysite.com~thisparm-data~thatparm-data/h1-http:~~www.mysite.com~thisparm-data~thatparm-data~n1-search1/n2-search2
(this URL would grow for every level the user drills down, so those hX/nX parameters would get really long after 2 or 3 levels) and could easily exceed hundreds of characters - if not more than 1k.

Why not use sessions?

I had considered it, but frankly, the tracking code I have works a little better as it still allows you to "share" a URL for as long as I keep the key's in the tracking database.

I was just curious if these long URLs have any relevence in search engine spidering and potential page ranking.

Ok - in that case, you should go with the database storage and ID.

Yes - URLs with a large number of parameters in the query string are more problematic for search engines than not.

Re: Google.com: Dynamic vs. Static URLs

Typically, URLs with 1-2 parameters are more easily crawlable than those with many parameters.