Google hijacking 404 error pages
Posted on February 26, 2008 by Ben Cecka
It was interesting to see some action on the Google Toolbar taking over the standard 404 error page on a website. I guess some web developers out there are a little up in arms, but hasn’t Internet Explorer been doing this for years? Any 404 page under 512 bytes is taken over by the browser, and now the Google Toolbar will have a thing to say about it too.
For me as a webmaster this is a major intrusion into my own intellectual property.
See Google’s explanation:
When a visitor tries to reach your content with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor.
This isn’t worth sweating over. If you use custom error pages then you already know (or should) to combat IE hijacking you need to make them larger than 512 bytes. If you’ve already done this, then the Google Toolbar will respect that too.
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