Microsoft Looking to Kill Generic 404 Error Pages

Microsoft is looking to sacrifice generic 404 error pages on the altar of Live Search. As far as it has even a remote possibility of driving up traffic for its search engine, Microsoft seems to be willing to give any scenario the time of day. The latest initiative from the software giant involves proving customizable, search-enabled web error pages to websites, in place of the standard error messages delivered to users, which are essentially useless. In this regard, Microsoft has made available for download the Web Page Error Toolkit.

"For large web sites with extensive amounts of content, 2 to 10 percent of traffic is looking for pages that either don't exist or have been moved. Most web servers return a generic 404 error page or a sitemap when a user's desired page cannot be found. These unhelpful pages often result in a dead end for users. With Microsoft's Web Page Error Toolkit, you can create dynamic 404 pages that contain customized error messages along with search results seeded with relevant keywords to help your users move past the missing page and find the information they need," explained Stephanie Horstmanshof from Windows Live Dev.

As you can see from the images included in this article, the generic 404 webpage at the top is transformed with usable content served via Live Search. In this regard, the Web Page Error Toolkit was set up to deliver advanced customization to enrich generic 404 webpages with query results from searches performed automatically with keywords extracted from the context which returned the error page in the first place. However, there is one clear downside to the Web Page Error Toolkit, namely the fact that it integrates only with server infrastructures running Microsoft products at the back-end. The toolkit cannot be implemented for websites on Apache, for example.

"The Toolkit is a customizable ASP.net application that replaces the default error page on your IIS server. The Toolkit enables you to use Live Search (or any search engine) to return results for the specified domain and locale, control the number of results returned on your page, choose whether to offer spelling corrections, and customize your error message. You also have the option of choosing from several keyword extraction strategies that are included with the install, or providing your own implementation," Horstmanshof added.

The Web Page Error Toolkit is available for download here.