Not so long ago another company decided that it would be a really cool idea to snag all 404 results from web searches and redirect the call to a handy service called SiteFinder. Of course that company was Verisign and the backlash against their service was of course resounding and effective. In no short order they pulled the service and 404’s went back to displaying those typically boring pages we have grown accustomed to.

Now flash forward to now and once again another company is hijacking 404 search results with the help of a handy dandy toolbar upgrade. That company is our very own do no evil Google and of course now that they have admitted that this is what they are doing they are doing their very best spin doctoring to make what was bad for Verisign to do an okay thing for Google to do.

As Duncan Riley points out in his post about this admission by Matt Cutts where Google is only hijacking the error pages if they are under a certain size:

Unsurprisingly Cutts suggested that the hijacking was a helpful measure and that it only takes place where the 404 page is under 512 bytes. I have to admit that it does sound warm and fuzzy, Google being helpful and all, but still, when Verisign started hijacking similar non page results, there was a mighty uproar.

Since this got mentioned as originally a rumor that slowly proved to be a fact I have been watching for posts about the new service from Google and unsurprisingly there has been next to no backlash at all; let alone any real conversation about it all if Techmeme is any indication.

One has to wonder then why it is that doing this type of thing was bad for one company and yet when Google does exactly the same thing nobody appears to be concerned in the slightest. Does this mean that now Google is allowed to do this with no backlash that other companies can spark up their own versions - such as SiteFinder?

As far as I am concerned any attempt to intercept my web surfing whether it be to insert ISP content in the page to this Google hijacking of 404 pages is wrong. Just because it is Google doesn’t mean they should be getting a pass on this.

Conversation Tags: Google, 404 redirects, Verisign, SiteFinder