New Google Toolbar Beta Hijacks 404 Pages?

Thats bloody awful. They shouldn’t capitalise on things like that. Leave peoples 404 pages alone google!!!

Hahaha… “the rights of the webmaster to decide what a user sees when visiting all parts of their website”….. hahahahahahaha….

Mark
I don’t see anything funny about that. If I design and host a site, that site should display pages as I deem fit, not Google, and that includes 404’s.

If it’s only the case when a webmasters has not defined a custom 404 page, I see this as a great addition to the online user experience.
Most sites are bloody awful and links rot over time, helping people find what they were looking for is not doing evil.

Get off the Google-bashing bandwagon already.

Fine.

I agree with you in principle, Duncan. I just feel that webmasters have never had any particularly great “right” to decide what the user sees when visiting their websites. More importantly, the rights of the user should always supersede those of the webmaster, don’t they? I mean, the user is installing the toolbar, after all.

But I certainly agree with your viewpoint as it specifically applies to the Google Toolbar. It seems like this functionality should perhaps be separate from the other functions of the toolbar, especially for any users who may use Google for, e.g., their web history.

Ack… English… not so good… I meant “shouldn’t they?” I suppose.

I think it’s OK as long as no 404 page is sent, which is almost NEVER. As useful as it may be it many cases, it’s important to have control of your website. Besides, good webmasters often make helpful (and sometimes funny) 404 pages.

If they seriously go ahead with this

i will turn off 404 headers and send http 200 instead

google are f****** desparate! they are over riding my sites design for their own profit

no way in hell

GOOGLE ARE EVIL!

This nothing new there were annoying spyware apps that used to do this on IE.

>This nothing new there were annoying spyware apps that used to do this on IE.

Uh, that’s the point, this is spyware behavior. The difference is spyware companies don’t have a team of apologists ready to justify anything they do.

I used Internet Explorer and this is definitely true. It seems to do it when the page is not found or when a URL is entered incorrectly. Never really thought about it, but if you are a site, that you have an automatic redirect for all 404 instances, then you could be missing out on a significant amount of uniques visitors and pageviews which all equates to monetization. Ouch!

http://www.customizegoogle.com

If webmasters want to control what the user sees on a broken link they should send a 200 response with a webpage stating the error, not a 404. So even if the toolbar displayed this page on custom 404 pages I wouldn’t think its all that wrong.

But if you googled a bit you could see that:

“When a site displays a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer provide suggestions for that site.”

http://googlewebmastercentral......tures.html

98.73% of webmasters’ suggestions will not be as useful as a google search box - wait… 99.99% i mean.

> If webmasters want to control what the user sees on a broken link they should send a 200 response with a webpage stating the error, not a 404.

But if a 404 error is returned when a crawler visits that page it probably won’t try it again, whereas with a 200 it will.

So there, nothing to see here, move along. It’s only in those cases where there’s no “real” 404 page, and in those cases, this display is way more helpful than the default 404 that IE displays — which also isn’t the server 404 message.

Does this also work when an entire domain goes missing?

Oh, and what Craig says. If some URL doesn’t correspond to a page (actually, to any resource), you send a 404. That’s what 404’s are for. 200 means “I found it!”, 404 means “I didn’t”. Dressing up the “I didn’t” (by site owners) to be more helpful still doesn’t make it a “I found it!” case.

Breaking the specs because you dislike some non-existant behaviour by a third-party toolbar to a third-grade browser is silly knee-jerk behaviour. Should I also stop sending valid HTML code because IE borks it?

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It’s on the Beta Google toolbar and is not enabled by default (it’s the “Find by Name” option). And it only replaces default error pages, as in, one’s a webmaster has not customised.

Not really that serious when you think about it.

> If webmasters want to control what the user sees on a broken link they should send a 200 response with a webpage stating the error, not a 404.

No, that’s a stupid idea - which is very similar as to why IE has such poor standards.

It’s definitely a better user experience to have something pulled up for a 404 page than nothing at all, but I still question whether the design of that page is the right one to have, especially from a branding point of view. So a link is broken… what does Google have to do with that? Why is their brand plastered all over this page?

For novice internet browsers who don’t understand the intricacies of 404 pages (unlike all of the comment authors here), I think this page will cause as many points of confusion as it does help people get unblocked.

I agree that the direction is right, but if I were Google, I wouldn’t be so anxious to put my brand *all over* this page… it seems like that could backfire with the Google Tooolbar audience.

I went ahead and tested it.. it shows the google’s 404 error page only if the application doesn’t have its customized 404 error page.. if the application has a customized 404 error page… then it promptly shows the one designed by the web site administrator

Internet Explorer operated this way from so far way back, it’s not even funny. If you put out a very short 404 — one that is clearly not customized — it would provide suggestions on how to find what you’re looking for. But if you did put out a custom page (more than 512 bytes, I think — just like Google), it wouldn’t do that.

It was hard to argue that this didn’t make sense. If you were a site owner that actually cared about visitors not finding what they wanted on your site, a custom 404 is easy to do and overrode whatever IE did. But if you failed your users, then having the browser kick in is nice for them.

Every time it’s one of DR’s sensationalist “_____ is evil” posts I move straight to the comments and find out “oh, there’s no real problem here at all.” Which Duncan would have found out himself had he imitated one of his readers and tested his claim.

“Hijacked?” Uh, okay.

Duncan: If you would just use Boot Camp you wouldn’t have to write something as “I also cant [sic] test the theory” in every other piece you write. Just a thought.

This is so wrong. Damn Google.

In IE, you can turn on custom 404 redirects locally on the machine. Dell has been doing it on new computers by default. The user can turn it off. I work in IT and have had to go turn it off on several machines. It causes some problems such as going to the local 404 page on sites that are working. Budget vehicle rental is one that I remember for sure.

Duncan: how do you feel about browser plug-ins that remove ads from sites?

-Scott

I read the comments here and I only see webmaster’s opinions, not web searchers opinions. I think if webmasters want users to find good content don’t put a 404 page there, put the content the user expected to find. If you can’t do that you are doing a disservice to your visitors while Google is performing a useful service. Don’t trash Google for being a bigger help than you, instead be grateful and thank them.

I don’t understand… why is it like that?

As long as it does not show if the site/application has a specific 404 page, I think it actually adds some value to the user. What is the alternative???

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See my comment log: SignMyContent_kOEMjb5J79rZxFGtt6mU_SMCEND

if you don’t like it don’t install the awesome google toolbar…

Google is not evil, Microsoft does it anyway w/ their browser. And Charter cable does it to their subscribers and all other isps will and all domains will be registered and there will be no more 404 pages…

Who cares about 404 pages? Are you going to miss them? Is it that hard to tell what webpage you are looking at? Would you somehow be confused if you saw a google search bar if the page you tried to view did not exist? How would this hinder your experience in any way???

Could this lead to a new variant of typosquatting through Google?

Since misspelled requests generate predictable search queries I suspect it would be possible to target these through Google…

Hmm, that feature is pretty cool actually.. if i mistype a domain name it shows me the right domain name and i can easily browse to it…

I think more than being evil, they have helped users to save some time…

> I think if webmasters want users to find good content don’t put a 404 page there, put the content the user expected to find.

Even if every internal link on the site is valid it still doesn’t help the situation where the user has followed a link from an external site which leads to a non-existent page.

Everyone calm down and buy some GOOG stock. Then you’ll stop complaining about it.
OMG, they are hijacking the 404 page!!!!
Everyone protest!!

Quite frankly, who cares. If you don’t like it, uninstall the toolbar. And for the rest of you “webmasters”, if people are getting 404’s you’ve got bigger fish to fry. Average users probably like seeing a more friendly page than the ones served by websites that haven’t addressed how to handle 404’s.

Has anyone tested if this only happens with default 404 pages somehow?

I think they have overwritten IE’s page not found file.

Yes someone has! Quoting:
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# Nagaraj Hubli

February 12th, 2008 at 4:50 am

I went ahead and tested it.. it shows the google’s 404 error page only if the application doesn’t have its customized 404 error page.. if the application has a customized 404 error page… then it promptly shows the one designed by the web site administrator

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Please update your blog entry or else this is just FUD.

So, we’ve established that it doesn’t intercept 404 results with custom pages - that’s good.

I’m going to assume that it won’t intercept XmlHttpRequests that return 404 without a page, otherwise it will have broken every RESTful AJAX application out there.

So far, nothing to worry about - it’s just chaged IE’s default 404 page. I’m cool with that.

i’m tired of people getting pussyhurt over google. i would much rather have this 404 page than something that serves no purpose whatsoever.

“If webmasters want to control what the user sees on a broken link they should send a 200 response with a webpage stating the error, not a 404.”

Absolutely freaking not.

That’s about the best idea to absolutely ruin everyone’s search experience I’ve heard lately.

If your website’s monetization or user experience control hinges on how 404’s are displayed, you probably have bigger problems to worry about than a google toolbar function.

A work around would be to have a custom 404 page that returns a HTTP code of 200. The content being page not found - i believe this is quite common. And being a Load Tester a bloody irritation (<- that’s a wry smile!!)

Still rather that than the makers of my browser or plug in high jacking things.

So can you explain me what about “Providing information the webmaster neglected to in the case of an error” is evil?

FUD, in my TechCrunch?

YAHOO! toolbars do something worse (or at Least Dealio’s toolbar in association with Yahoo!)

Yahoo! toolbars do something even more annoying, when you open a new blank tab, its not blank, it suggests Yahoo search terms.

I guess if yahoo doesn’t nobody notices and calls them evil.

Whatever. 404 pages are pretty useless on most sites anyways. No one wants to see one. I don’t see this as a bad thing.

Cmon, it’s better than a non-customised left as is IE 404 page.

So how long before Google start selling product off the back of this? Incoming keywords, 404 page with ads on it…

Who cares. Really?

The notion of one hijacking something that doesn’t exist is absurd.