

Did You Mean: Google Maps? - kloncks
http://erickerr.com/did-you-mean-google-maps

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kejadlen
The irony is that they already have a solution for this:

[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/make-
your...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/make-
your-404-pages-more-useful.html)

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roach
I think it's better to return the 404. I hate it when the Comcast DNS
redirects me to their search page when I misspell a domain name.

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romland
You can meet all standards (http's 404 error) and still have links on the
error page.

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mmelin
It sounds like Comcast is redirecting to a search page instead of returning
NXDOMAIN for non-existing domain names. That is certainly not possible do to
and at the same time be standards-compliant.

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kree10
That's what they're doing, though only if the domain matches /^www\\..+/ which
(along with their allowing you to opt-out) makes it a few degrees less evil
than Verisign's infamous "Site Finder".

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bmalicoat
I've always found Google's 404s jarring and retro in the worst way possible.
They are in desperate need of a complete overhaul not the least of which
should be the author's 'Did you mean?' functionality.

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nzmsv
404's need to be somewhat jarring, because the user needs to see a difference
between a normal and an error page. Having "did you mean" suggestions would
still be useful, though.

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bmalicoat
Eh, they could at least use their current logo and make it link back to
google.com when clicked.

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ugh
The logo they use never even was their logo. It plain old Times Bold with
different colors applied. And they use tables for the layout.

There is no image on this page, it’s all just a pretty small html file (1,359
bytes).

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ugh
Just as an aside: Google’s misspelling detection is so damn good that I find
myself smashing keys without much care whether I hit everything correctly or
not whenever using Google.

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ghshephard
In case anyone is tempted to downvote the parent, I'll attest that is pretty
much my searching behavior as well - in fact, it's often the case that I don't
use the built in spell check of OS X spotlight (CMD-Space), but instead do
CMD-T (new Tab), CMD-K (Search) - and then type some characters that _roughly_
approximate what I'm trying to spell, and then hit enter.

Google usually has my results as one of the first hits, or, alternatively,
pops it as a "suggestion"

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swolchok
Counterexample: google.com/dumbass is a 404. Searching for google.com/dumbass
returns results. "Did you mean: Google It You Dumbass" is not kosher.

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erickerr
Good point - this could me mitigated by only returning the results if there
are matching Google products

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swolchok
Another interesting one: gears.google.com does not redirect to
google.com/gears, which is a 404. Contrast with voice and talk. Discoverable
URLs clearly aren't a priority.

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iigs
Two potential problems:

1) I don't recall who it is, but someone who is not google holds a patent
(sigh) on using the URL path after the host as the search string.

2) If it was my property to control, I would not want google.com/{*} to
accumulate links on the internet. That is to say, before there was
google.com/maps, one would expect some people to link to that URL directing
their users to search for maps. Now that google is so big, that could be a
dicey prospect, because substituting their own property for what would have
previously been a search could reasonably be seen as anti-competitive.

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roryokane
In response to point 2, Google could still require that links to search pages
still go to google.com/search?q=whatever. google.com/whatever would show a
differently formatted page that shows a big error message at the top, with the
search results as an extra, not the point of the page. This would mean that
Google introducing new sections of the site would not conflict with links to
search pages.

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teej
If google, in theory, determined that users almost immediately hit the back
button when they hit a 404 page, it would make sense to have the page load &
render as fast as possible. Right now, the page size is ~1.3k for me.

I also have a feeling that the 404 may be implemented in a different part of
the stack than search. In a very unscientific test of data, the response times
for 404 pages according to firebug are at least 10% faster than the normal
response on the same subdomain. Also, of all the subdomains I tested, only
m.google.com, picasaweb.google.com, and docs.google.com had different 404
pages.

Like I said, this is all blind guessing, but my feeling is that Google has
reasons for not better utilizing 404s. Having better 404's isn't rocket
science and there are google properties that have them (youtube) so there's
certainly reasoning behind it.

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houseabsolute
You'll probably notice that the 404 pages across most Google properties is the
same. For example:

<http://images.google.com/mapss>

And you might also notice that no matter what subdomain you hit, the path is
all that seems to matter:

<http://images.google.com/maps> <http://maps.google.com/images>

It would be logical to conclude that there's some server you're hitting before
you get to the service specific backend, and that maybe that is the reason the
404 pages come back faster.

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duairc
As I live in Ireland I use google.ie. I often accidentally type maps.google.ie
or mail.google.ie, to be greeted with a 404. Seems like a fairly easy problem
to fix.

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cduan
If I had to guess, Google probably gets so many hits for bad URL's (from
hackers and such) that it's not worth the processing power to return custom
404 pages. (Notice how it also has no images?)

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nomoresecrets
There are an awful lot of people who never use the address bar - they just go
to google.com and type the URL into that.

So this kind of makes sense.

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paul9290
Umm they don't want u to type in the URL they want you to Google even the URLs
you visit daily. When people see the 404 I would fair to say they get
frustrated and Google what they were looking for.

