404 errors are never a delight, neither for a website’s visitors, nor for its developers. It generally means that somewhere and at some point something went wrong, sufficiently so that users can no longer access the content they’re looking for. Generic 404 errors are also of no use, except when it comes down to building frustration. A new project from Microsoft is designed to make 404 error pages for WordPress blogs useful to visitors. In collaboration with PHP guru Cal Evans, the Redmond company developed Bing 404 for WordPress, a plug-in for the blogging platform that is, of course, available for download free of charge.

“The Bing404 plugin for WordPress [is] a great new plugin that returns a page of intelligent search results in place of the unhelpful WordPress 404 error page by using keywords extracted from the dead URL that otherwise would have resulted in a dreaded ‘Page Not Found’ error. The plugin is part of the Bing Search Library for PHP project,” George Thomas Jr., Bing Developer Center, revealed.

The Bing Search Library for PHP project is essentially a wrapper built on top of the Bing API (application programming interface). As the name implies, Bing Search Library for PHP is designed to allow PHP developers to leverage Bing in order to submit searches to and retrieve results that can subsequently be integrated into their websites, Cloud applications, etc. The Bing Search Library for PHP was also developed in conjunction with Evans.

“The idea is simple: instead of sending the default WordPress ‘404/Page not found’ error page to a user who gets the wrong page URL on your site, why not try to redirect the user to content that he or she may be looking for?” Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Sr. technical evangelist, asked. “URLs are often meaningful because they include important keywords (at least that’s a good SEO practice). So let’s try to extract those keywords from the URL, pass them on to Bing API to find the matching pages, and display smart suggestions to the user!”

Bing 404 for WordPress is available for download here.