Andy Jarrett: Google Chrome hijacks 404 pages

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Google Chrome hijacks 404 pages

I was testing a custom 404 page this morning on Chrome when instead of seeing my page I got the following

You can turn it off on YOUR computer but the problem is that you can't do it for your users. This means that if you use your 404 pages to try and re-direct your users to the right link or even revenue via ads then you loose out! It would be nice if you can set a HTTP header or something along these lines to tell Google to not be clever but till now

To turn this off on the Mac go to Chrome > Preferences > Under the Hood and deselect "Show suggestions for navigation errors".

For other OS instructions check out http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95671&hl=en

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Posted By Glyn Jackson @ 2/21/10 12:46 PM

Interesting that this is being done client side in Chrome and a default setting. I wonder what the reason for this is..... let me think what the future could hold...... advertising!

Posted By Jason barnes @ 2/21/10 2:12 PM

Isn't nice that on their 404 page they are being helpful by providing you with a google search option.

Posted By Jasper @ 2/21/10 2:19 PM

What a seriously obnoxious feature. I get the scumbag angle of wanting to get you on pages to show adverts, but there's a line!

Posted By Seb Duggan @ 2/21/10 10:31 PM

Just tested this against one of my own custom error pages, and the expected error page displayed just fine.

I'm running Chrome 5.0.307.9 beta on OS X. And I checked it in Firefox, and the page is certainly returning a 404 header code...

Posted By Geoff @ 2/22/10 1:46 AM

IIRC you have to return a certain number of bytes to have your page shown... If your 404 page is too short, it'll be ignored.

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