Just sharing a nice little code snippet that makes use of regular expressions instead of loops for converting.

function getQuery(s) {
  var query = {};
  
  s.replace(/\b([^&=]*)=([^&=]*)\b/g, function (m, a, d) {
    if (typeof query[a] != 'undefined') {
      query[a] += ',' + d;
    } else {
      query[a] = d;
    }
  });
  
  return query;
}

// usage:
// var o = getQuery('maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&q=brighton&ie=UTF8&iwloc=addr');
// console.dir(o);

Note that if a query string key is found more than once, it's value is appended. If you don't want this functionality, remove the test for undefined.