Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly

http://www.google.com/notaurl

by ladon86 • 15 years ago

313 106 15 years ago

nathan82• 15 years ago

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

rimantas• 15 years ago

Also:

  href=//www.google.com/

Title is funny :) I think they could drop margin:0; padding:0 from css, default values in browsers won't change much for this type of page anyway.

tuxcanfly• 15 years ago

`//www.google.com` will automatically translate the url to http/https depending on the requested protocol.

stanleydrew• 15 years ago

None of the html attribute values are quoted either.

cstuder2• 15 years ago

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...

rodh• 15 years ago

Maybe that logo is used elsewhere, and there's a high likelihood for that logo to be in the user's cache.

estel• 15 years ago

The other image, the logo, is probably generic enough that it's used elsewhere and a user is likely to have it cached. The other looks bespoke for this page, so wouldn't.

pbhjpbhj2• 15 years ago

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)

reedlaw• 15 years ago

Does every browser support base64 encoded images embedded in css?

beaumartinez2• 15 years ago

I don't think the older ones do; however, I'm sure Google gives them a different 404 page (change your User-Agent to IE6 and see how different the search results HTML is).

cstuder2• 15 years ago

Almost every browser. Guess which ones don't.

(I'll give you a hint: It's MSIE 6 and 7.)

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme#Web_browser_sup...

kpreid• 15 years ago

Base64 isn't exactly efficient. (Though it might be more efficient than an additional HTTP request. But if so, why aren't they using it for the homepage logo, say?) I wonder if they're using it as non-useless padding for stopping the IE-overrides-too-short-404s behavior.

visural• 15 years ago

Base64 is ok when the response is gzipped

tnorthcutt2• 15 years ago

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

xbryanx• 15 years ago

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

tnorthcutt2• 15 years ago

Pretty sure it's not a typo ;)

Matt_Cutts2• 15 years ago

What makes you think that's a typo? We're not allowed a bit of humor every so often? :)

nrbafna• 15 years ago

Intentional typo. You could get a 404 by mistyping the URL and hence it fits.

kgermino• 15 years ago

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 :)

alanh• 15 years ago

Awkward verbiage.

nitinsingla• 15 years ago

yea typo in the title !!1,

bostonpete• 15 years ago

I think it's intended as a joke.

siddhant• 15 years ago

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.

sahillavingia• 15 years ago

Just FYI, that wasn't their actual one, but the 404 for their April Fool's joke: http://www.google.com/tisp/

edw519• 15 years ago

I like Yahoo's better:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkenning/464845773/

jules2• 15 years ago

Reddit's is cute too:

http://allthatsnew.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/reddit.png?w=...

squid_ca• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

andrewingram• 15 years ago

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.

citricsquid• 15 years ago

This was something I was thinking too. I watched a video from Matt Cutts yesterday where he mentioned they have a "team" (I guess it could just be 2 people, but it sounds like more) who are entirely dedicated to parsing 404 pages that return 200 response codes. I too wonder if they had a team just for this, or maybe they have a "usability" team who were tasked with this?

elliottcarlson2• 15 years ago

This would be a completely different thing though - parsing 404 error pages that incorrectly return a status 200 OK could cause broken links to appear as duplicate content when crawled. Didn't think about this before but I am sure this does require q dedicated team to be able to distinguish this kind of content.

yror105• 15 years ago

This is already shown by the rareness of a google 404. You hardly ever get it these days. Except if a server crashes for about 1 second, (where my preference would be "you are the lucky winner to click your mouse at the same second as our server crash!"

cakeforcerberus2• 15 years ago

Making the new 404 HTML page was probably someone's "20% project" for a year.

yror105• 15 years ago

I've heard about the 20% things but look a the page and ask yourself. Anyone could have made that in 5 minutes + maybe a week for discussion.

leif4• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

Why did they not remove whitespace too?

asymmetric• 15 years ago

don't knkow if it's firefox inserting them, but i do see closing tags, apart from <p> elements, but that's allowed.

TorbjornLunde• 15 years ago

Seems weird to have Arial in the font-stack, as Arial is the default font for sans-serif on Windows. (And Helvetica on OS X which has the same metrics.)

joelhaus• 15 years ago

>> I prefer the idea of a more intelligent 404 page

There's a script for that: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/make-your...

Example:

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

absconditus• 15 years ago

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

jedsmith2• 15 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2279949 is a start.

bradgessler2• 15 years ago

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...

ZoFreX• 15 years ago

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.

AdamTReineke• 15 years ago

Cache issue? I see it on my account regardless of where I sign in.

Griever• 15 years ago

Same thing happens to me. I'm assuming its a cookie or cache issue.

yror105• 15 years ago

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.

dchest• 15 years ago

To get the new look, I just deleted cookies from google.com.

Groxx2• 15 years ago

And have you noticed the changes to Docs? Their list display is finally useful!

bradgessler2• 15 years ago

Yeah, though I think they should cut buck on using bold font all over the place. That should be use for emphasis but the Goog wants to use it as the default.

swcharl• 15 years ago

I'm a student, and I find Google Docs is super useful. I just wish for a more consistent experience. For example, I like to edit with "Compact Controls." Sometimes that feature goes missing, and I'm forced to edit in full screen – not an incredibly useful feature because the controls are completely hidden.

davidmurphy• 15 years ago

It's made usability worse though, in one important respect: logging out requires two clicks, not one. :(

wdewind• 15 years ago

That's true only under the assumption that the UI should be optimized for the Signing Out process. It shouldn't, the design has improved usability by hiding less frequently used options.

haraball• 15 years ago

I have the new top bar in gmail, but not in greader.

digitaltothem• 15 years ago

My case too. I don`t have it in Picasa either, but I do in Docs.

jeffbarr• 15 years ago

> "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• 15 years ago

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>

nicklovescode• 15 years ago

that page also has no body tag

dmaz• 15 years ago

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.

ewanr• 15 years ago

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

kaisdavis• 15 years ago

And the page doesn't include a search bar?

mikeivanov• 15 years ago

Is that Salo?

joetek• 15 years ago

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?&...

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

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

Like, a lot.

kordless• 15 years ago

Check out ours: http://loggly.com/404

Groxx2• 15 years ago

Aww, typing "skedaddle" doesn't skedaddle :(

Luyt• 15 years ago

And I created this one: http://access-training-amsterdam.nl/xyzzy

...abandoned in the desert...

NovaDesu• 15 years ago

This is mine, http://demontunes.com/asdasd poor fly

joshmanders• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

moblivu• 15 years ago

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

gohat• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

He did their 500, not their 404 I believe

rlmw• 15 years ago

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.

marcamillion• 15 years ago

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.

viviensin• 15 years ago

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! =)

Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly

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