# 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:** [May 11, 2017, 8:29pm 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:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

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**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)\
**Post date:** [May 11, 2017, 8:33pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-doesnt-404-page-search-locally-instead-of-google/62547/2 "2017-05-11T20:33:47Z")

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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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