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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 responsib
by andrewingram 16y 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 16y agoThis 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?
- elliottcarlson 16y agoThis 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.
- yror10 16y agoThis 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!"
- cakeforcerberus 16y agoMaking the new 404 HTML page was probably someone's "20% project" for a year.
- yror10 16y agoI'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.
- cakeforcerberus 16y agoOf course. I was being sarcastic.
- yror10 16y agoO, ok haha
- leif 16y agoGoogle'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 16y agoWhy did they not remove whitespace too?
- leif 16y agoNo idea, I saw that too and was puzzled.
- beaumartinez 16y agoI'm guessing it's not much of an issue when it's sent compressed over the wire.
- colanderman 16y agoNeither are closing tags...
- colanderman 16y agoWho 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 16y agoWasn'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.
- joelhaus 16y 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-404-pages-more-useful.html 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>