Discuss: The Perfect 404

by Ian Lloyd

51 Don't redirect the 404

One thing that annoys me almost everyday:

Some people redirect every 404 Error to their [strong]Main 404 page[/strong]. So I loose the original URL in the case I’d like to debug my incorrectly typed URL or to hack it in order to [em]look what I can find around[/em].

So, whatever 404 page you put, please, don’t redirect the user somewhere else.

posted at 02:44 am on February 13, 2004 by Gari Araolaza

52 google's cache

What might be a good feature to have on 404 pages is a link to google’s cache, entering the adress that creates the 404 error. It might help the users to get what they are looking afterall.

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:[pagethatisnotfound]

posted at 07:23 am on February 25, 2004 by 2

53 Apple

Good solid article with useful info. Check out Apple’s 404 error page (http://www.apple.com/gobbledeegook) – they seem to have really hit the nail on the head here.

posted at 02:23 pm on March 4, 2004 by Trenton

54 Don't do 404 error pages !

There is no reason for 404 error pages.

In the years I am browsing the web, no single 404 page has helped me and your approach does not help either.

The site is either searchable or not. If so, what does it cost to return to the top or the previous page and access a search box there ?

404 is an error. An exception. It means: No document at given location.

This is important ! Robots, Spiders, Downloaders use this to compute results. And these programs are the ‘other’ users of the web. You simply let them not read.

Whenever I mirror a site with ‘wget’ I am very angry for all those 404-error-pages, that mean nothing to me. Even worse, this way sepcialized programs are not able to determine “holes” in a web-document.

How with an error is being dealt is solely up to the clients programmer and user, not (!) to the web-designer.

The web would be much nicer, if more web-designers would realize, that the internet is not a human-only territory.

posted at 04:13 pm on March 24, 2004 by amix