Like everyone else, I hate arriving to a 404 'page not found'. It's like showing up to a party at the wrong house. Sure you can call and find out where the real party is but in the mean time your just lost. Surfers that arrive to missing pages, if they are like me, will more than likely just leave. After all, google has about another 1,000 results waiting for me.

Editing the .htaccess file is great for permenant URL re-naming using 301 re-directs, but for mis-written URL links, Drupal, the engine running this site and many others, has a great module that can turn these missing pages into real results. Search 404

Instead of showing a standard "404 Page not found", this module performs a search on the keywords in the URL, e.g. if a user goes to http://example.com/does/not/exist, this module will do a search for "does not exist".

Now why didn't I think of that? Rather why doesn't everyone? Now I do not go into the habit of renaming URL addresses but a link could be misspelled or out of word order. If there is more than one result then the Drupal Search 404 module takes the surfer to a results page, giving them the titles to each article.

Try this 'broken' link. See have it shows all of the topics in a nice search menu?

Here is a shot of the simple interface that is listed in Search 404 module settings.

If you need to permenantly rename a URL then use the .htaccess settings as I outlined in another post.