# Why doesn't 404 page search locally instead of google?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-doesnt-404-page-search-locally-instead-of-google/62547
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [5월 11, 2017, 8:29오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-doesnt-404-page-search-locally-instead-of-google/62547 "2017-05-11T20:29:59Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [5월 11, 2017, 8:29오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-doesnt-404-page-search-locally-instead-of-google/62547/1 "2017-05-11T20:29:59Z")
[https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-wrong-or-stupid-slug](https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-wrong-or-stupid-slug) returns the
### Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.
page with some recent topics and at the bottom
### Search this site
but it uses a Google search. This is worthless for sites that aren’t indexed, if instead it returned a list of local searches, or, better, the search page.
This would come close to solving my “I can’t guess the slugs” problem for an import.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [5월 11, 2017, 8:33오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-doesnt-404-page-search-locally-instead-of-google/62547/2 "2017-05-11T20:33:47Z")
Because Google is quite a bit better in the “type random words into search, some of them misspelled or missing entirely, and get a decent search result” department.
That’s why.
The budget for that sort of effort is many orders of magnitude over what we at Discourse can bring to bear on the problem. [Google has 57,100 employees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google) many of whom work on search. We have.. _eleven_.
If you end up on 404, you are sending a strong signal that you need _serious_ help. So we offer serious help.
(We do suppress this part of the page for private sites, obviously, as google can’t see into private sites. @techapj added that feature a while back.)
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [5월 11, 2017, 8:38오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-doesnt-404-page-search-locally-instead-of-google/62547/3 "2017-05-11T20:38:39Z")
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> Because Google is quite a bit better in the “type random words into search, some of them misspelled or missing entirely, and get a decent search result” department.
That much is true. When you’ve got a bunch of imported data, though, being able to through those words to the local search is gold. I think that to solve my “we want redirects for the old slugs, but don’t have the slugs” problem will be to redirect all topics to a local search for the slug terms.
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> (We do suppress this part of the page for private sites, obviously, as google can’t see into private sites. @techapj added that feature a while back.)
That’s cool. Does “login required” == “private”? I’m getting the google search on this private site.
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [5월 11, 2017, 8:39오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-doesnt-404-page-search-locally-instead-of-google/62547/4 "2017-05-11T20:39:02Z")
Could be a regression, @techapj can check into it.
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [5월 11, 2017, 8:56오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-doesnt-404-page-search-locally-instead-of-google/62547/5 "2017-05-11T20:56:24Z")
I’m wrong. It is turned off on my private site.
Sorry, @techAPJ.