Google News, Inside.

A rule of thumb I try to live [my webmaster life] by is one described by the W3C.

What makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.
What sorts of URI change?
URIs don’t change: people change them.

So, with that in mind, what is the best practice for URIs and websites? When you create a URI, do not change it, ever.

Sure, of course I understand that there are some circumstances where it’s critical to change them, but as a rule of thumb, I do everything possible to avoid changing URIs.

So I was looking through one of my old articles about Google Earth Beta6.

I clicked through just to see if the links still work, but..*gasp*, give me a minute. No, Google has broken the interweb.

No 301, no 302, a flat out 404.

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:40:32 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Server: gws
Content-Length: 1365
Connection: Close

Come on Google, can’t we get a freakin’ 301 or at a bare minimum a 302 redirect to the Google Earth homepage?

I know you’re big Google, but I do not believe you’re bigger than to follow the standards of the web and go and break things like that.

It’s a simple thing, but Google is failing and breaking the interweb.

Very disappointing.

As a site note, I have since changed the links so they do not point a 404 on google.com anymore.