I think the interesting part is that: 2XX - Request was understood and we found what you were looking for can be broken down into two parts: 1. Request was u

I think the interesting part is that: 2XX - Request was understood and we found what you were looking for can be broken down into two parts: 1. Request was understood 2. We found what you were looking for. This guy seems to be advocating that completing a search and there being no results is actually a successful request, and so should be responded to with 200. The problem though is that the spec (RFC7231) requires a representation of the resource to be sent in response to a GET. If there's no payload, then you can send a 204 instead, but this raises its own challenges - a 204 just means that the server is not sending content, not that no content was found (which is a subset of 'not sending content'). I think on balance, 404 is correct - the spec indicates that it should be used where there's no current representation, which I think is an accurate description of a failed search.