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.
Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
91–100 of 113 posts
Re: Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
#92Check out ours: http://loggly.com/404
And I created this one: http://access-training-amsterdam.nl/xyzzy ...abandoned in the desert...
This is mine, http://demontunes.com/asdasd
poor fly
Re: Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pa…
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.)
Google uses Arial in the font stack across all of their pages, for consistency. I assume the following rationale is at least mostly correct.
In case a computer doesn't have that as the default for some reason, they don't want their page to look any different, if it is possible for the computer to display it correctly, because if it doesn't, it affects their brand image.
Imagine if you did a google search and everything looked just a little bit off (and you weren't a developer so you didn't know why): you might think someone was hacking google and stealing your information or changing your results. Consistency builds trust, and this is important to them.
Re: Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
#94Given 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.
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?
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.
Re: Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
We unfortunate users of IE6 get the new 404 page as well. I assume they just gave up on IE6 like most of the web-world has.
Yep here's what I see on our IE6 death machine: http://i.imgur.com/bTXtn.png
Which could be another indication why the Google logo itself is linked (besides it being in cache as well). The page degrades well imho in IE6 - the lack of the cutsey robot isn't essential to the page - the logo however is.
Re: Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit's is cute too: http://allthatsnew.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/reddit.png?w=...
that page is reserved for 500 errors. for a 404 they swap out several images. see http://www.reddit.com/thisisa404
Aww, some pages just make you want to hug their creators. I wish more sites had this kind of warm gems.
Re: Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
#97Google 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...
It's made usability worse though, in one important respect: logging out requires two clicks, not one. :(
Re: Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing it's not much of an issue when it's sent compressed over the wire.
Neither are closing tags...
Who 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?
Re: Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
#99This 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.
He did their 500, not their 404 I believe
Re: Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly
#100So, 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?&...
I personally prefer the simple, simple, simple 404 pages.
Like, a lot.