After finding this post, when looking myself I thought I should add that I don't think the most up-voted solution is the best. It doesn't handle array values (such as ?a=foo&a=bar - in this case I would expect getting a to return ['foo', 'bar']). It also as far as I can tell doesn't take into account encoded values - such as hex character encoding where %20 represents a space (example: ?a=Hello%20World) or the plus symbol being used to represent a space (example: ?a=Hello+World).
Node.js offers what looks like a very complete solutions to querystring parsing. It would be easy to take out and use in your own project as its fairly well isolated and under a permissive licence.
The code for it can be viewed here: https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/lib/querystring.js
The tests that Node has can be seen here: https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/test/simple/test-querystring.js I would suggest trying some of these with the popular answer to see how it handles them.
There is also a project that I was involved in to specifically add this functionality. It is a port of the Python standard lib query string parsing module. My fork can be found here: https://github.com/d0ugal/jquery.qeeree