I search Google a lot, maybe twenty times a day. But lately, I’ve been getting many 404 errors. Anyone else having these problems or is it just on my side?
I’d say it just depends on what you’re searching for. When I search for something like a corporate website, a 404 is rare. But if I’m searching for something like “aliens are watching me” I might get a rash of web addresses that have been discontinued or moved.
Maybe I should’ve been more clear. I meant that trying to access Google gives me a 404 error, not sites I go to through Google. Sorry about that.
No, I haven’t had that problem. What’s your Net connection? Dial-up, cable?
Dsl
The only time I get 404s when attempting to open Google™ are when my service has been lost and I did not realize it.
So, assuming you have not been losing your connection, how do you usually open the Google window? Do you pluck it out of Favorites/Bookmarks? Do you hit the drop-down arrow on your Address window and select the most recent access? Do you type in “http://www.google.com/” (or even “www.google.com”) each time, yourself?
My first thought would be that you’ve recently gotten into a pattern of keystrokes that is making the url invalid (e,g,, hitting a comma for a period that you don’t notice) or that you did this once and have been accidentally grabbing that same erroneous url off the “recent sites visited” window. (You can check this by looking at your drop-down of recent visits: if Google shows up more than once, there will be some difference betwen the two addresses–one of which should be an error.)
That’s impossible. A 404 error is returned from the web server. How could you get the 404 error if you had no Internet connection?
There’s a 404 page built into either windows or MSIE (for XP Pro at least). If I disconnect my internet connection and type an address into MSIE, it gives a 404 error page. Not sure if Netscape or Firefox does that though.
Actually, Google has a unique 404 page with the google logo on the top and a blue bar with “error” on it. It doesn’t say 404 at all.
Try this: http://www.google.com/~asdg/asfk.txt
If the OP is getting a generic 404 error page, it’s probably generated by a local file hidden somewhere in the c:/windows directory.
I also know that in Firefox, if you type in a non-existing URL–or one that the server is down, you just get a blank page and a popup window saying that the site could not be found with an “OK”. MSIE pulls up Yahoo and tries to do a search on my computer, probably due to some plugin or setting that I don’t know about since I don’t use it anymore.
Yes, but his point is that you only get an actual 404 error if you successfully reached the web site you were looking for, but the requested page was not found. IE may actually display a local 404 page to communicate that problem to you, but you got the error itself from the web site. This can’t happen if your internet connection is dead. What you’re probably getting is the “Cannot find server or DNS Error” page.
It could be possible, however, to erroneously get a 404 error page when trying to access google if you’re going through a proxy server that’s acting broken.