How to bring up a search result instead of a ‘Page Not Found, 404 Error’?

One could never forget Nestor, the wise and thoughtful butler of Captain Haddock, in 'The Adventures of Tintin'. With the captain constantly away on adventures with Tintin, Nestor ensured he received the guests, in Captain's absence, and make them feel at home. Never did a guest face a closed door or an unanswered phone at Haddock's place, all thanks to Nestor.

Very frequently the occasion arises when your Drupal site could make use of a Nestor instead of having to show a visitor the dull and gloomy "Page Not Found" (404) error page. 404 error occurs when the visitor types in the wrong URL, or clicks on a dead link. More common possibilities are when a page's URL was changed recently, or if the page was deleted after it has been indexed by search engines.

SEO-wise, the 404 page is one of the worst and most common error  a site can show to a visitor. If it happens that the visitor clicked on a link of your site through a search engine and reached the 404 page, mostly, the visitor would just bounce off and would hesitate to click on another search result that shows our site's name.

Furthermore, search engines tend to penalise sites (adversely affecting the site's search rankings) for dead links that lead nowhere.

Here comes to your rescue, Search404 - a Nestor for your Drupal site.

Search404 is a Drupal module that effectively says the following: "I'm sorry we dont have the page you asked for. But hey, maybe these pages would contain what you were looking for: ..." and brings up a search on the keywords in the URL - often helping in retaining the visitor and effectively reducing bounce rates, in a way that Search engines love!

Features:

• Supports 404 Searches via Apache Solr Search Module if it is enabled
• Supports searching via Google CSE, if the module is present
• Supports Search by Page module as an option
• Supports Lucene Search when available
• Supports Lucene Did You Mean when available
• Supports Xapian Search when available
• Supports Fuzzy Search module as an option
• Support for Custom Text and Title to be displayed in search404 pages
• Option to choose between 301 and 302 redirects
• Option to show side blocks when a 404 error occurs
• Includes search engine keyword detections as well as regular expression-based term filtering from the URL.

Search 404 is used by more than twenty thousand drupal sites across the world and is one of several modules that are maintained by Zyxware Technologies
Download Search404 for your Drupal site (available versions: 6.x, 7.x) from Drupal.org.