redirect 404 to similar urls

Question

I have a website with stories in it. I can have multiple types of stories within multiple categories like:

• children
• romance
• scifi
• action

Answer 1

Oh man, oh man!

What you're asking for is not simple and need you to have a powerful computer, but the results are simply amazing.

Here's what I'd suggest to do:

• For 404 proper handling, you have the ErrorDocument redirection in vhost configuration. Mine looks like this: ErrorDocument 404 /404.php ;
• When having a 404, Apache will call /404.php with all the arguments (which bad URL and so on, dump $_SERVER to see this). You have to test if there are only two expressions in the URL / i.e. http://mysite.com/(expr1)/(expr2)/
• If not, then do a classical 404.
• If yes then do a SOUNDEX search with MySQL (in your 404 Php file). See query sample here.
• Then, in this "special" 404 case, do a suggestion, like google does, i.e.: "did you mean /action/story-name-action/? if so, click on the link".

This a hard work, but it's both interesting and shows your skill. Very few websites do this (I just know google actually).

Here's a demo on my French table that could give you an overview of how it works:

mysql> SELECT * FROM job WHERE
SOUNDEX( description ) LIKE SOUNDEX('Machiniste cinéma');
+-------+--------------------+
| id    | description        |
+-------+--------------------+
| 14018 | Machiniste cinéma  |
+-------+--------------------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM job WHERE
SOUNDEX( description ) LIKE SOUNDEX('Mchiniste cinéma');
+-------+--------------------+
| id    | description        |
+-------+--------------------+
| 14018 | Machiniste cinéma  |
+-------+--------------------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM job WHERE
SOUNDEX( description ) LIKE SOUNDEX('Machnste cinema');
+-------+--------------------+
| id    | description        |
+-------+--------------------+
| 14018 | Machiniste cinéma  |
+-------+--------------------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

mysql>