404 No More!

404 – Page not found is the all too common error message, when a web page that you were looking for, is not at the requested location any more. Some sites have really cool and creative 404 error pages, but that’s not what you wanted.
If the page still exists on the site, this handy tool will help you to quickly find it back.

If you encounter a 404 error, apparently the page is not at the location that you expected. The page may still exists, but have moved to a different location on the site, or you may have misspelled the address. In those cases, you may still find the page using Google (or another search engine). Even if the page has recently been removed, you may still find it in the Google cache.

You can quickly do a search and find the page, using the bookmarklet 404 No More!

It reads the address of the current page, turns the parts of the address into search words, and limits the search to that site.

Installation

A bookmarklet is a small piece of JavaScript, that can be used as a link. It can be bookmarked, or added as a favourite. Instead of just going to a new web page, it performs some action, in this case creating a search query and going to Google using this query.

If you use a bookmark bar in your browser, you can simply drag the button/link onto this bar.

Alternatively, you can create a new bookmark, and paste the code below in the the URL destination field.

javascript:document.location='http://www.google.com/search?q=site:'+document.location.toString().split('/').slice(2).join('+').replace(/[#=\?]+/g,' ');

See Wikipedia for more information on bookmarklets.

Use

Once installed, when you encounter a “404 – Page Not Found” error, click on the bookmark or call the bookmark otherwise, and you will see the Google search results. If the page still exists on the site, it will probably show as the first result. If not, you may have to tweak the search query, and use the most relevant words only.