What is a non-capturing group? What does (?:) do?

Consider the following text:

http://stackoverflow.com/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/regex

Now, if I apply the regex below over it...

(https?|ftp)://([^/\r\n]+)(/[^\r\n]*)?

... I would get the following result:

Match "http://stackoverflow.com/"
     Group 1: "http"
     Group 2: "stackoverflow.com"
     Group 3: "/"

Match "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/regex"
     Group 1: "https"
     Group 2: "stackoverflow.com"
     Group 3: "/questions/tagged/regex"

But I don't care about the protocol -- I just want the host and path of the URL. So, I change the regex to include the non-capturing group (?:).

(?:https?|ftp)://([^/\r\n]+)(/[^\r\n]*)?

Now, my result looks like this:

Match "http://stackoverflow.com/"
     Group 1: "stackoverflow.com"
     Group 2: "/"

Match "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/regex"
     Group 1: "stackoverflow.com"
     Group 2: "/questions/tagged/regex"

See? The first group has not been captured. The parser uses it to match the text, but ignores it later, in the final result.