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June 3, 2008
Microsoft Live Search Solves 404 Error Problem
No one likes generic 404 error pages. Site visitors have to click the back button and start their search over. Most times, they give up on the site.
To solve that problem, Microsoft Live Search will now enable Web site owners to create error pages that recommend help even if the exact URL isn't available.
The Web Page Error Toolkit is a customizable Web app that extracts keywords from the search and delivers relevant search results in a custom error page.
Here are the details on the Web Page Error DTK:
For large web sites with extensive amounts of content, 2 to 10 percent of traffic is looking for pages that either don’t exist or have been moved. Most web servers return a generic 404 error page or a sitemap when a user’s desired page cannot be found. These unhelpful pages often result in a dead end for users.
With Microsoft’s Web Page Error Toolkit, you can create dynamic 404 pages that contain customized error messages along with search results seeded with relevant keywords to help your users move past the missing page and find the information they need.
The Toolkit is a customizable ASP.net application that replaces the default error page on your IIS server. The Toolkit enables you to use Live Search (or any search engine) to return results for the specified domain and locale, control the number of results returned on your page, choose whether to offer spelling corrections, and customize your error message.
You also have the option of choosing from several keyword extraction strategies that are included with the install, or providing your own implementation.
Posted by Kevin Heisler at June 3, 2008 12:55 PM
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Comments
If it is asp and requires IIS then only available to Windows servers???
Also anyone can do this with a good server side script... guess MSN is going for the naive to grab search from 404 pages.
Also how long before these pages get indexed into the engines? no 404 means spiders will follow to other page and index.
Posted by: AussieWebmaster at June 3, 2008 11:29 PM
@AussieWebmaster: You know that you can serve content on a 404 page, right? The article says that the application serves dynamic 404 pages, which implies it is still a 404 and search engines will still know to de-index the page.
Posted by: Bob at June 4, 2008 1:30 PM
