The 404 or Not Found error message is the error page displayed whenever someone asks for a page that’s simply not available on your site. The reason for this is that there may be a link on your site that was wrong or the page might have been recently removed from the site. As there is no web page to display, the web server sends a page that simply says "404 Page not found".
The 404 error message is an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) standard status code. This "Not Found" response code indicates that although the client could communicate to the server, the server could not find what was requested or it was configured not to fulfill the request.
The 404 "Not Found" error is not the same as the "Server Not Found" error which you see whenever a connection to the destination server could not be established at all.
The default 404 error page as shown on Internet Explorer is given below.
When we expand the code 404, the first digit “4” represents a client error. The server indicates that you did a mistake like misspelling the URL or requesting for a page that is no longer available.
The middle digit, 0 represents a general syntax error and could indicate a spelling mistake.
The last digit, 4 refers to a specific error in the group of 40x.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) states that 404 Not Found should be used in cases where the server fails to find the requested location and is unsure of its status. Whenever a page has been permanently removed, the status code used must be 410. But hardly have we seen a 410 page. Instead, 404 Not Found page has become popular and the most commonly used error page.
A 404 response code is always followed by a human readable reason phrase as per the HTTP specification. Generally, a web server issues an HTML page that has the 404 code and the “Not Found” phrase by default. You can configure a web server to display a branded page with a better description and a search form. But the protocol level phrase requires no customization as it is hidden from the user.
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SOURCES : en.wikipedia.org
www.404errorpages.com
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