Word Pronunciation & Dictionary

soft 404

Word Rarity Rare

Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.23 in modern English

Syllables: soft- 404
IPA

7

Scrabble Score

4

Letters

2

Syllables

4

Unique Chars

Meaning

noun

A 404 page (the result of trying to follow a broken link within a website) which reports a 200 OK HTTP response code rather than 404 Not Found, falsely indicating to the browser that the page exists and was loaded correctly.

Example Sentences

"To ensure that the server would return a soft 404, the random sequence of characters was appended to an absolute URL and file path. […] Given that our research deals with identifying and predicting soft 404s, we chose to use a ratio of 50% normal pages and 50% soft 404s."
"However, redirects also may be “soft 404” messages to hide broken links."
"These so-called soft 404 error pages can degrade the performance of a web crawler since they are usually not worth downloading and indexing."
"The data crawling also has specific problems that must be observed such as time between requests, soft-404 error, identification of URL patterns of the pages, and extraction of data from the source code."

Etymology

Introduced in 2004 by Ziv Bar-Yossef et al.

Inflected Forms

soft 404s (plural)

Questions

What does soft 404 mean?: A 404 page (the result of trying to follow a broken link within a website) which reports a 200 OK HTTP response code rather than 404 Not Found, falsely indicating to the browser that the page exists and was loaded correctly.
Where does soft 404 come from?: Introduced in 2004 by Ziv Bar-Yossef et al.

How to pronounce soft 404

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