About this strange little museum

404 Not Found is a curated collection of missing pages found in the wild. The static archive currently contains 131 approved exhibits and updates whenever the curator publishes a batch.

What gets collected?

Pages that do something memorable with an ordinary failure: a useful recovery, a sharp bit of writing, a surprising interaction, or a design with unmistakable character.

How does submission work?

You submit a domain. Our capture robot checks /robots.txt before requesting/404, records the HTTP status, takes desktop and phone screenshots, and saves them in a private moderation queue. A human curator reviews and edits every exhibit before publication.

The capture robot

The crawler identifies itself with the product token NotFoundMuseumBot and a link back to this section. We follow the applicable robots.txt group and the most specific matching Allow or Disallow rule. A disallow is respected. A robots.txt server error or unreadable response stops intake; an ordinary 4xx response means no policy file was available and follows the robots exclusion standard's default-access behavior.

What about soft 404s?

A real missing page should return HTTP 404. Some famous error pages incorrectly return 200. The museum flags those as soft 404s and only publishes one when the curator deliberately overrides the check.

Who built it?

This museum is handcrafted and operated by Internet Crafters.