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404 to Search Page

Comments: 8

When you try to access an address on a site that doesn’t exist, you get a 404 error. What you should get is an attempt to find the page you’re after and, if that doesn’t work, a search page where you can enter a string of your own devising. Thanks to this ingenious PHP snippet from Erik Barzeski that’s exactly what you can offer wayward visitors to your site.

I know I’m a bit late to the party with this one — Erik posted this back in February but better late than never when it comes to improving 404s.

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Posted to Computers • 2003.05.20 (Tue) • 23:50

Comments

Posted by Ian 2003.05.21, 00:18

There are a couple of issues with doing this which you might want to be aware of.

Posted by Erik J. Barzeski 2003.05.21, 07:16

Those “issues” as others have pointed out are not things that couldn’t be done anyway - repeatedly querying mt-search.cgi and so on.

Posted by Jon 2003.05.21, 14:23

I have implemented said script over at MobileTracker.net and will do so for ">News Is Crappy as soon as I get around to it.

Those people who said it’s easy to DOS with are insane. Just make a search query, note the URL. Bomb like hell. All the script does is make errors friendly…

Something that should always be done if possible.

Posted by eliot 2003.05.21, 14:42

I’ve been doing this for months.. I didn’t realize it would be so popular, or I would have published my script as well. I basically yoinked some code from my MT-RefSearch script to provide users with helpful 404 pages. Since I switched my blog’s archives to use the path format (yyyy/mm/dd/entry_title.php) rather than the MT default (004578.html), I also included code to find the new location of those entries.

I wish big sites had more helpful 404 pages like bloggers are using. Motorola is a wonderful example because I run into dead links on their site nearly every day. I just want the content!

Posted by amd 2005.09.21, 14:44