Google returns 'no results' for unindexed URLs - why not offer a link?

[chrisk999]

I am involved in a site that creates simple websites for our users to distribute information on events to friends/family.

Our slightly less net-savvy audience tends to type their new site's address - e.g. www.their-subdomain.ourdomain.com - into Google/the Google toolbar, rather than use the browser's address bar.

If Google has not spidered the site yet, it returns a:

"Your search - www.their-subdomain.ourdomain.com - did not match any documents."

The logical thing would be for Google to provide a link to this URL, as our users therefore think the site is broken, and send us an angry email. We then point out that they should use the address bar instead of the Google search box, and they always email back with an apologetic reply.

However, this mistake occurs multiple times each day on our site alone - why doesn'y Google offer a link on the results page (perhaps after a quick ping to check the site exists etc)?

What do others think?

Best wishes,
Chris

[edited by: tedster at 3:59 pm (utc) on July 18, 2009]

[tedster]

We can be sure that they've thought about it - after all, they certainly know how very often people type urls directly into the search box. They even have a name for it - "navigational searches".

My first thought is of how much extra bandwidth all those pings would cost. And without the pings, Google would be offering a lot of broken links. That would certainly be a poor user experience.

[dstiles]

Until recently google did offer a link (at least in the UK), along the lines of "Not found - try clicking on this link to see if site exists." It infuriated me because people were typing control panel links into google and then following them, which I'm sure alerted google to CPs they shouldn't know about and were blocked from search anyway.

Far too many people think google IS the internet. It's becoming a serious problem - as you say, people get angry due to their own internet-illiteracy.

[encyclo]

One possible reason they don't do it is the potential for abuse. If implemented, spammers could use links to Google search results such as these in spam emails. Google may well be unwilling to become a redirection service to URLs that they have not yet crawled (ie. where no malware analysis has been done).