Is
Google [
^]broken at your place?
It gave me
About 169,000,000 results in 0.48 seconds.
Short answer - de facto limit of 2000 characters
If you keep URLs under 2000 characters, they'll work in virtually any combination of client and server software.
Longer answer - first, the standards...
RFC 2616[
^] (Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP/1.1) section 3.2.1 says
The HTTP protocol does not place any a priori limit on the length of
a URI. Servers MUST be able to handle the URI of any resource they serve, and SHOULD be able to handle URIs of unbounded length if they provide GET-based forms that could generate such URIs. A server SHOULD return 414 (Request-URI Too Long) status if a URI is longer than the server can handle (see section 10.4.15).