To answer your question, what this means is that you are alerting an instance of an object. For instance, when alerting the object, toString() is called on the object, and the default implementation returns [object Object].
var objA = {};
var objB = new Object;
var objC = {};
objC.toString = function () { return "objC" };
alert(objA); // [object Object]
alert(objB); // [object Object]
alert(objC); // objC
If you want to inspect the object, you should either console.log it, JSON.stringify() it, or enumerate over it's properties and inspect them individually using for in.