Most Creative 404 HTTP Response Ever? - DotTechnologies

The HTTP 404 Status Code is one of the HTTP status codes that all web developers and nearly all web users are all too familiar with. It is an HTTP response indicating that an HTTP request was received by the intended server, but that the exact resource specified in the request URI cannot be found on the server. In the early days of the World Wide Web, it seemed like many sites did not bother doing anything in particular about this page. This meant that a pretty useless and nearly blank page would show up in the user's browser. Some browsers, such as Internet Explorer, attempted to provide more general details in a "user friendly" format.

These browser attempts at providing more details about the cause of a 404 response status were still not very helpful because there is no good general way to handle a 404 error response. Instead, it is preferable for a site to provides its own custom 404 response page. The advantages of a custom 404 are discussed in more detail in Importance of Custom 404 Error Pages.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of sites providing a custom 404 error response. This is especially true for sites that want to do whatever that can to retain the user's business and/or traffic to their site. These sites attempt to do their best to provide a search or suggestions for what the user can do next. Some sites don't try to fix the situation, but instead automatically redirect to the site's main page. Other sites perform a combination, providing a search box and acknowledgement of an unfound page for a few seconds and then automatically redirecting to their main page.

After seeing the reference on reddit Programming to Github's Star Wars Themed 404 Page, I wondered if there are any 404 error responses more clever than this one. The Github 404 page may not be the best at helping the user find what he or she was looking for, but it is funny and does provide links to other actions that might be taken.

I tried some intentionally unavailable URIs on some of my most-accessed sites to see how their 404 responses are handled. In the rest of this post, I look briefly at some of them and analyze the value each provides. Mostly though, I was simply looking for the most interesting 404 page I could find and so far I haven't found any more funny than Github's.

http://marxsoftware.blogspot.in