It does not require an escape in the browser's address bar, but it could always be doing some kind of "smart" conversion to hide the inner workings from me. I'll try your example code with my query string...
No, it still doesn't work. Both the escaped and non-escaped versions work in the browser, but neither work from the get call. I can download other pages using get, and it's not having problems with other 'query' URIs with slashes in the query part of them, so I am thinking it is something on the server end.
After some further testing, nothing from that domain can be retrieved by the get command. This is a company-owned website, so I will try contacting the admin, see if there is any workaround.