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Saturday July 03, 2004

A Google option I'd like to see

So here I am. I've just done a search at Google and I've got a lot of hits back. But several of them give me 404 Not Found messages when I actually try to go to the search result.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a "Validate Results" button on the search results web page, that'd go off and check them all for you and then just redisplay the ones that don't generate errors (and/or redirect you to another page)? I strongly suspect the Google brains trust thought about this at one time and rejected it, as it would grind their server farm to a halt. Perhaps there is some way to download that functionality to the searchers computer. A plugin perhaps...

I don't really know too much of how Google works (apart from the pigeons), but I'd like to think that if when you click on a link, and it generated a 404 error, that Google's database of hits was somehow (eventually) updated to not show that link any more. I'm not sure that's correct though.

[Technorati Tag: Validation]

[Technorati Tag: Google]

( Jul 03 2004, 02:16:23 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [3]

Comments:

Seems like a good idea, but indeed google already do that and you get these error only for those FBN kindof of webservers as whenever webcrawler runs it go and see if 404, than consider webserver down and reduces its rating(What if microsoft was under attack?) and than slowly remove it.

Posted by Hemant Singh on July 04, 2004 at 04:36 AM PDT #

Strange. Okay, I can understand the FBN. But here's an example. I've been doing a lot of image searching at Google recently. For this particular blog entry I looked up "search". Down in the bottom left corner of the first page of results is an image from a teen model search. Click on the thumbnail and you get a 404. Now that I've clicked and failed (yesterday and today), will that image go away from Googles database in the immediate future?

Posted by Rich Burridge on July 04, 2004 at 07:22 AM PDT #

>Will that image go away from Googles database Well well pretty good question, im sure even god will take good amount of time before replying to this question, after all it is googles database ;-) But I guess so that it will go away because once long time back I had a talk with a guy whose company use to take contract for increasing your preference in google search result(most part is manual)and if exactly remember that talk than yes that will go, BUT if that 404 comes when google crawler runs. Regarding the verifying the search result, it is a good option, but I guess it might be tradeoff for them keeping it or no, why should they add something which 99% people don't need (Just my thoughts)

Posted by Hemant Singh on July 05, 2004 at 12:34 AM PDT #