No Search Results Found - Should this return status code 404?

[WEB-IRS]

A question came up today on how to correctly serve the right status code on pages where no search results are found.

I did a couple searches on some major eccomerce and news sites and they were ALL serving status code 200 for No Search Results Found

http://www.zappos.com/dsfasdgasdgadsg

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=sdafasdklgjasdklgjsjdjkl

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=dfjakljgdkslagklasd&_sacat=0

http://www.cnn.com/search/?query=sdgadgdsagas&x=0&y=0&primaryType=mixed&sortBy=date&intl=false

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=sdagasdgasdgasg

I thought I read somewhere were it was recommended to serve a status code 404 on these types of pages.  Based on what I found above, all sites were serving a 200, so it appears this may not be the best practice.

Any thoughts?

[bradkrussell]

Hi,

Those sites are correctly serving a 200 page.

Think of it this way - if you were searching for 'sdagasdgasdgasg' in SEOmoz (as in above URL), this term is not found yet on any page on site. But, it may be contained on a page that is published in the future (highly unlikely for that term I know, but you get what I mean). Hence they serve a 200 page.

In terms of usability, if you were on a site and you searched for something and were presented with a generic 404 page, you'd probably think that something had gone amiss with the search functionality. However, if you were presented with a 200 page with "Sorry, no results found" you would be more likely to assume the search functionality had in fact worked, there was just nothing to return.

[donford]

404 would make sense only if we were referring to what you were searching for. Basically 404 says this page is not found, but could be found again later...

In this sense we are talking about the webpage not the product being searched for, which is what response codes are all about. So a 200 response would be correct, the page is there, the results are null.

Does that make sense?