How to tell Google about their own 404 - in the serps for months?

[mickmel]

If you search for "google earth", approximately the 6th entry is for "googleearth.com/?GXHC....". It tries to redirect the URL to "earth.google.com" (the #1 result), but dies with a 404. I let it go for a few weeks, but it remained. I contacted the Earth team about it, and they said "they're looking into it". However, that was about three months ago!

How can a person submit this URL to Google and let them know about it?

[tedster]

At the bottom of every search results page on Google there's a link that says "Dissatisfied? Help us improve"

That's one way - and instead of going to the Google Earth team, it goes to the Search Quality people, so you'll have a new audience.

BTW, we normally don't discuss specific search terms
(see Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]) but I made an exception in this case.

[mickmel]

tedster -- thanks for letting me post that on here. This result has been bugging me for months, and I'm rather shocked that Google hasn't fixed it yet.

[tedster]

Yes - it looks like the problem comes from the parameters in the original URL, and they eventually trigger a 404 after the domain level 301 redirect. The URL actually has a session ID in the query string parameters!

The initial request gets a "204 No Content" response before the 301, so that may also be part of the issue for Google.

[Receptional Andy]

Interesting handling of parameters in URLs (404 for anything).

They could do with a better 404 page too (one about Google Earth would be nice) ;)