When publishing or saving a search link, there's no benefit in including the &searchToken=something at the end of the URL, so it's better left off.
If I publish a link to a search query, should I include the searchToken (like &searchToken=a1b2c3d4) in the URL, or should I not? (Let's say this search link will be used a lot.) Does it matter at all?
What is the purpose of the searchToken parameter?
If you want to use comprehensive links, please omit the &searchToken=whaffle suffix.
It is used by developers to track most recent queries, but has no effect later.
Once I thought this will reuse a previous result set and will allow to accelerate by scrolling through thousands of recent hits, but I learned that it just leaves a track in a temporary server log for a few minutes.
The possibility that it was for re-use of a cached search was what I wanted to rule out with this question.
Results are not affected by the searchToken so it's perfectly fine (and certainly cleaner) to drop it when linking to the search result page (a new token will be generated anyway). The search token allows WMF engineers to associate frontend logs with backend logs (see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schema:TestSearchSatisfaction2).
