404 is an error message that means that the page you asked for has moved or been deleted, or that you have typed the address incorrectly.

Basically, it's netspeak for telling you that you have taken a wrong turning.

There are some easy things you can do to try and find your way to the page you want.

What it looks like

The 404 error can sometimes look a little different.

Sometimes it will say "404: page not found" or sometimes it will give a nicer reply, in plain English like "The page cannot be found. The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable."

Some websites have tried to make life easier for you by making friendlier easy-to-understand error pages. We have! Try visiting this link and then clicking the back button to come back here. BROKEN LINK!

Nice, wasn't it?

404 History

So why 404? Well, the man who invented the world wide web, Tim Berners Lee is credited with having chosen which numbers go with errors on the web.

There is a story that he named it after room 404 in the building where the web was invented and that two technicians were sitting there checking out all the errors.

Unfortunately, that's an internet myth as you can see from Area 404. It's a great site which has everything you could ever want to know about 404s even comic examples of these error messages from around the net.

404s are becoming a little less common as time goes on. This is partly because websites are making their own more friendly error messages like our one above.

Also, if you write gobbledygook into a browser like Internet Explorer it will jump to the MSN search page and try to find the page you are looking for.

A little tip

If you get a 404 but know that page you want is on the site you have visited but are not sure where, try deleting all the part of the website after the .co.uk or .com part of the address.

This will take you to the homepage for the site and if you are in luck you'll find they have their own site search engine where you can try and find the page you want.