
Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly - ladon86
http://www.google.com/notaurl
======
siddhant
I liked the older one better - <http://www.google.com/tisp/notfound.html>

_You might have typed the URL incorrectly, for instance. Or (less likely but
certainly plausible) we might have coded the URL incorrectly. Or (far less
plausible, but theoretically possible, depending on which ill-defined Grand
Unifying Theory of physics one subscribes to), some random fluctuation in the
space-time continuum might have produced a shatteringly brief but nonetheless
real electromagnetic discombobulation which caused this error page to appear._

~~~
squid_ca
The "MentalPlex" April Fool's Joke would have been funnier if it had
automatically entered "porn" into the search box after a few seconds.

~~~
Natsu
I'd have entered "they don't really expect me to believe that, do they?"

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kgermino
A part of me is sad about this. The old page functioned just fine and acted as
a relic of the old Internet. I thought it was kind of cool how they left it
alone, especially since it served it's purpose just fine without costing
anything. Not that I'm denying it was ugly as all hell :)

------
bradgessler
Google has been really been stepping up their design over the past few months.
I really like the subtle tweaks they made to the top bar across all google
pages:

[https://img.skitch.com/20110302-kdhkc99usamdhb6yaptrw2y81d.j...](https://img.skitch.com/20110302-kdhkc99usamdhb6yaptrw2y81d.jpg)

~~~
ZoFreX
This hasn't rolled out for everybody yet - I see it at work, but I don't see
it (when signed into the same account) at home.

~~~
yror10
It is on google.com but most of the other country domains (.ie, .co.uk,
etc...) havent got it yet. Currently its the same with google instant.

~~~
patrickk
I'm on .ie and I have it:

<http://i52.tinypic.com/2cf8kdh.jpg>

I only noticed a friend with it on his account last week. The next time I
singed into my account it came up, and it's been there ever since.

~~~
yror10
thats not it

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tnorthcutt

       <title>Error 404 (Not Found)!!1</title>

~~~
xbryanx
Ha!1 Nice to know that even the almighty at Google are prone to some typos
every once and a while.

~~~
tnorthcutt
Pretty sure it's not a typo ;)

~~~
m_myers
Definitely a typo. They left out a "one" at the end.

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andrewingram
Given the size of Google, I wonder if there was a whole team tasked with this
development. A 404 page for a company as big as Google is an awfully big
responsibility for just one person :)

To be honest, I prefer the idea of a more intelligent 404 page. You'd think
Google would have sufficient horsepower to make a good guess at what you might
have been trying to find.

~~~
leif
Google's most frequently accessed pages (most prominently, the homepage
itself) are designed by a team of pretty high-level engineers, to reduce
latency and bandwidth requirements, by stripping bytes. Every change is
reviewed with extreme scrutiny. I'm sure the 404 page was designed with
similar care.

If you view source, for example, the image is base64 encoded, and they don't
even bother closing their tags on the page, because that's more bytes and the
browsers don't notice. This was very carefully engineered.

~~~
switch007
Why did they not remove whitespace too?

~~~
beaumartinez
I'm guessing it's not much of an issue when it's sent compressed over the
wire.

~~~
colanderman
Neither are closing tags...

~~~
colanderman
Who in the world downvoted this, please own up? Can you show that gzip does
not, in fact, perform well at compressing repeated strings of text such as the
likes of closing tags?

~~~
leif
Wasn't me, but why make gzip do the work when you can do it once, easily,
yourself? Sure it _can_ do it, but their servers _can_ serve the closing tags,
and google strips those. The discrepancy is weird is all.

------
nathan82
View the source. All the css is inlined, the images are base64 encoded, and
there's no closing tag. That's one efficient 404!

~~~
cstuder
One image is inline, the other is a conventional file. I wonder why.

Oh, and it validates indeed:
[http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com/nota...](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com/notauasdfadf;No200=1)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I don't understand how it validates - I'd always understood that html, head,
[title] and body were required for a complete document. Certainly the draft
spec at <http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/semantics.html#the-html-element-0> appears
to confirm this ...

Fairplay to them though, they got a semantically and structurally deficient
document to validate - it's like the IE6 of webpages ;0)

~~~
nostrademons
The elements are required, but the tags are implied by the tag structure of
the rest of the document. They're added automatically at parse time:

[http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tokenization.html#the-before-
html...](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tokenization.html#the-before-html-
insertion-mode)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
That's a strange version of "required". Basically the elements are not
required in a document until parse time at which point they are inserted
following an extremely arduously defined algorithm.

It seems bizarre to me that you wouldn't simply define the location of meta
elements strictly as being in the head but instead define that should the
parser find them they should be wrapped in to a head element.

On a brief view it looks like one can just drop a meta tag, say, in anywhere
in the document and the parser has to move this to the head element?

I didn't realise that they were encouraging tag soup; this isn't part of the
spec I've seen before. This sort of complex parsing algo wasn't in XHTML1.X or
HTML4.X was it?

~~~
iclelland
You can see the HTML 4.01 definitions at
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.3>

The complex parsing algorithm wasn't spelled out in excruciating detail, as it
is in HTML5; much of it was implied, and left for the parser developers to
figure out.

Strictly, the HTML, HEAD, and (BODY|FRAMESET) _elements_ are required, in a
valid document, but the _tags_ delimiting them are optional. That way, code
which manipulates the DOM can always count on a HEAD element being present,
and CSS specifiers can use 'body' as a root, even if the tags themselves are
missing from the source HTML file.

The first actual _required tag_ in an HTML 4 document is <title>, as far as I
know. Every HTML document has to have one, and it needs to be opened and
closed explicitly. If it's the first thing in the document, it implies an
<html><head> before it, and if body content comes after it, that will imply
</head><body> as well.

You could put a <meta> tag anywhere before the first body content, and it
would still be part of the implied HEAD element. As long as it doesn't come
after the (explicit or implicit) </head> tag, it shouldn't cause the document
to fail validation.

And no, none of this is valid XHTML. XHTML is always strict, and all opening
and closing (or self-closing) tags must be present in the source file.

------
joetek
So, the new 404 page isn't really useful. They could maybe add some links to
help people find what they were looking for.

Maybe someone at Google should take a look at these very helpful tips on what
to include on a 404 page:

[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?&...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?&answer=93641)

~~~
sliverstorm
I personally prefer the simple, simple, simple 404 pages.

Like, a lot.

------
kaisdavis
And the page doesn't include a search bar?

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jeffbarr
> "That's all we know."

Not true. They know the sub-domain and the path. Either or both could be used
to do something more intelligent.

~~~
staunch
They could use The Google 404 search widget thingie.

    
    
        <script type="text/javascript">
          var GOOG_FIXURL_LANG = 'en';
          var GOOG_FIXURL_SITE = 'http://www.google.com'
        </script>
        <script type="text/javascript"
        src="http://linkhelp.clients.google.com/tbproxy/lh/wm/fixurl.js>
        </script>

------
dmaz
The response says the server is "sffe". It seems to be used for static web
hosting on android.com and providing HTTP error codes for other sites. I'm
guessing it's running on the edge servers, but Google hasn't publicized what
it is, that I could find.

------
kordless
Check out ours: <http://loggly.com/404>

~~~
Luyt
And I created this one: <http://access-training-amsterdam.nl/xyzzy>

...abandoned in the desert...

~~~
NovaDesu
This is mine, <http://demontunes.com/asdasd> poor fly

------
marcamillion
So what is the key take away here ?

When you launch, as a matter of fact for the first 10 years, having a clever
error page is not a "MUST-have".

Prioritize!

Btw, this comment is just as much for me as for the next guy.

------
gohat
This is nice, but more developed, cutesy ones with animals and such are all
the rage. Maybe they should ask the guy at The Oatmeal comic if he'd be
willing to help; he did the Tumblr one for free iirc and it's fairly awesome.

~~~
culturestate
He did their 500, not their 404 I believe

------
rlmw
Does it matter whether 404 pages are ugly or not? I mean its a nice experience
for a confused user, but I'd frankly rather it made suggestions as to similar
urls that might exist, where possible.

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viviensin
I thought "That’s all we know." is cute because this is probably the only
moment in Google's history to admit not being able to find/ know the reason
why as a superpower search engine! =)

------
moblivu
Haha, a nice simple error page! Still, nothing beats that one
<http://www.abovetopsecret.com/404.html>

------
joshmanders
Love it. Especially the changes they have been making. Keeping Google's
signature simplicity, but also adding a little modern look. to it.

Kudos to Goog.

------
kamdar
Google should at least put search bar on 404 error page. Isn't that the most
basic thing?

------
ewanr
"That’s all we know." but is it 'useful' ?

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alanh
Awkward verbiage.

------
mikeivanov
Is that Salo?

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nicklovescode
that page also has no body tag

------
nitinsingla
yea typo in the title !!1,

~~~
bostonpete
I think it's intended as a joke.

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absconditus
Who cares? What interesting discussion is there to be had about this?

~~~
jedsmith
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2279949> is a start.

