Have you ever seen a website say “404 – page not found” or something very similar? This can happen if a page has since been moved or deleted, or if you’ve typed the address wrongly so the page can’t be loaded. Most of the time the error messages are fairly dull – some of them might even be slightly useful and point you to the homepage or let you search the website to try and find the page you were looking for.
Sometimes organisations make a bit of an effort and produce an error message that is also entertaining, though, adding delight to the user experience design. For example Kew Gardens keeps the ‘garden’ theme going in its message, and Innocent Drinks has a whole page describing previous errors that the company has made. Lego‘s 404 not found page has a picture of a minifigure dressed as a construction worker who’s looking a bit worried and the page says “We’ll try not to lose our head over this, but if we do… we’ll put it back on.”
‘404’ has become the universal language of ‘something that is not found or cannot be found’. If you are ever in a computer science department that happens to have a Room 404 there’s a very high chance that someone will have jokingly added a post-it note saying “Room not found”.
Incidentally if you were to search on Google Maps for CS4FN’s building (the Peter Landin teaching rooms, originally called the Bancroft Road Teaching Rooms) you’d find that someone has changed our address to 404 Bancroft Road (click the link to see if it hasn’t been changed back since). We’re not sure who did it or why but we’re fairly sure a computer scientist in the department was behind it.
Why “404”?
There may be different reasons that a website can’t load a page and sometimes it can be helpful to know why. You might be reassured to know that the problem isn’t anything to do with you, and to be told that the server that is hosting the pages is busy or down for maintenance and you should come back later. Rather helpfully there is a list of agreed “server response codes” so that whenever a page won’t load a differently numbered message appears depending on the reason.
There are quite a lot of these messages and they all have three digits. If the digit starts with the number 4 then it means that the problem may have come from the user (such as you typing in a web address wrongly so being given the 404 message). If it starts with the number 5 it means a problem on the server’s side and it’s not probably going to be able to show you pages because of a fault. You might also have seen “Error 503 – Service unavailable” – that’s usually a temporary fault just try again later.
Making 404 pages more useful
In 2012 a group of organisations that helps raise awareness about missing children encouraged companies to add some helpful information to their 404 pages so that every time someone landed on their ‘wrong’ page they’d be shown a name and photograph and any relevant information about someone the police and emergency services were trying to locate, and who to call if they knew who they were. What a great idea!
– Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London
Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).
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This page is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.
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