• tal@lemmy.today
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    8 days ago

    404 means that a web sever doesn’t have something at the URL you requested.

    Search engines build an index periodically by looking at what’s on a website. That’s what provides your search results. They aren’t informed if a web server removes or moves content, though eventually, they’ll have a bot that checks, notices the change, and updates the index.

    They — well, Google, and I assume most — will update major sites more frequently, so this is probably more common if you’re pulling something off a small, backwater website.