Turn your 404s into lost children alerts | Hacker News Reader

Turn your 404s into lost children alerts

notfound.org

357 pointsjonny_eh163 comments

I appreciate the noble motives behind this, but programs like the AMBER alert have not proven very effective[1].

Furthermore, abductions by strangers are incredibly rare; most abductions are by people that the child knows well (such as an estranged parent/relative, etc.). These are the cases for which the AMBER alert is most likely to have success, but they're also the cases for which it is the least likely to be necessary (ie, people investigating the case are going to be several steps ahead of a passerby who happens to drive by the billboard).

Also, 75% of children who are abducted and murdered are killed within the first three hours, so the shelf life of these alerts is incredibly small. Even smaller for people who are sitting at the computer when they see the alert, not driving on a freeway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#Controversy_about_...

A friend of mine growing up had an older brother who was abducted. His mother quit her job and spent the next 5 years looking for him. Eventually, she found him. She called her mother's home and her son picked up the phone. He had been abducted by his uncle and told that his mother had sent him to live with his extended family. No one suspected it.

Now, I know n=1 is not a good sample size, but to downplay the significance of kidnappings by "someone the child knows" or that "it was a family member" is not reasonable.

Also, a study on the effectiveness of amber alert messages on the freeway be extrapolated to give data on results from a 404 campaign.

I can't estimate whether or not internet amber alerts are a good or a bad idea. Just tossing in my 0.02.

Your parent is not arguing that kidnappings by non-strangers are insignificant; rather, that public service announcements about such kidnapping are unproductive.

Whether this is actually the case, I have no idea.

And your parent was providing an example where public service announcements about such kidnappings could have been productive.

I don't think he provided example for successful public service announcement.

Right. Instead the example that refutes the idea that public announcements aren't necessary for finding kids who were kidnapped by family members because the authorities would have looked there anyways by providing a anecdote where a public service announcement could have helped find a kid who was kidnapped by family members and not found (for a long time).

Yes they did. In the original story, no-one doubted the uncle's claim that the child had been sent by their parents. If there were public service announcements that "This child is offically missing", someone might have copped that something was up.

If the right individuals had seen the public service announcment. Were there any public service announcements for that abduction example given?

I think it's a given that nearly all the impressions of a public service announcement of a child abduction will be seen by people who have never seen that child. There's a cost of seeing a PSA of a child abduction. People will now consider child abductions more likely than they actually are. This causes them to make decisions that may be against the best interest of their children like go outside and play.

It would be more effective to have the FBI do face recognition on everyone's vacation photos on Facebook. Assuming that the kidnappers want to raise the kid as their own, they are bound to post pictures of him. This won't work for the 75% that chimeracoder alleges are murdered, but it might for the scenarios like the one you described.

Why would a kidnapper would post pictures of a child they kidnapped on FB? Criminals are not always rocket scientists, and even then they aren't always rational(1). The kids also tend to go to birthday parties, school, and other places where other people post pictures of them that get posted on social networks.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak

Wouldn’t there be a prohibitive number of false positives? It sounds like the poster child for this sort of calculation: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2b0/bayes_theorem_illustrated_my_way...

chimeracoder was saying 75% of kids who are murdered after being kidnapped are murdered within 3 hours of being kidnapped.

i.e. in conditional probability notation, P( A | B and C) = 0.75 where A = murdered within 3 hours of being kidnapped, B = kidnapped, and C = murdered.

Some way to tag your children (see Woz's attempts) are probably going to be more successful than alerting random people.

Or how about raising children self-confident enough to make a phone call home and demand to talk to their mother directly after a couple weeks.

And they would let him, why?

If they won't, he knows something is up. Did they never let him outside in public, never go to school, never have contact with anyone who could help?

If so, he was basically just locked in the basement, the whole thing about saying he was sent there didn't actually matter.

I don't mean flat-out deny, There's a reason why simple social engineering works with a very high degree of success, and manipulating small children who have trust in his kidnapper (which isn't rare, since they're often family members) is even easier.

Which is why I suggested raising less gullible, passive, compliant people. Gullibility is a problem, here and elsewhere.

I think raising people to be good, independent non-gullible people is a better approach than sticking trackers on them.

While we perhaps inculcate a bit more compliance than is strictly necessary, you can't make children not gullible. To be not gullible irreducibly requires enough experience with what is normal to know when something is not normal, and alas, not only do children have a straight-up calendar disadvantage there, the children that we are talking about are also more likely to not have a normal to compare against in the first place.

This is the wrong time to play that tune.

Reminds me of: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=elizabeth_sm...

> Which is why I suggested raising less gullible, passive, compliant people. Gullibility is a problem, here and elsewhere.

Young children are going to be gullible and compliant because they are young children.

That isn't something you can change until they are no longer young children. It's a question of both the teaching time required and the mental development required to learn those skills.

Similarly, some older children and adults are going to be gullible and compliant because they are mentally handicapped. Again, this isn't something you can fix by training them.

He was raised normally and went to school during those years.

I don't know what his thought process was but leaps of logic are a commonly observed phenomenon among kidnapped children.

A quick google on "Steve Wozniak children tag" and similar did not give any results. Can you provide a link? Would love to read more about that.

Billboard??

Over here (in the Netherlands), we have a text message / radio broadcast / digital road sign alert that's put out within hours of the child being reported stolen.

> Also, 75% of children who are abducted and murdered are killed within the first three hours

This is exactly why it's a very fast, responsive system (here).

The parent post mentions "billboard" but it is a digital road sign (at least the ones I've seen). It's on a pole higher up so people can see it easily, similar to how many billboards are done.

If even ONE SINGLE CHILD is found and returned back into the loving arms of a parent due to a repurposed 404 page, the initiative is a great success.

Don't you think?

Why doesn't Google stick a random missing child photo next to their logo on every page view? Surely it would be seen by millions in a matter of an hour. Why doesn't Windows display a little message in the corner of every desktop, linking to an important charitable cause? Why don't you place a bunch of 5x5 signs of missing kids in your lawn? You value the appearance of your lawn more than the possibility of saving a life? Why do you watch TV when kids are dying? You could be working, and saving money to send them food. You could have saved hundreds of lives if you didn't watch that last season of Breaking Bad.

Want more initiative? Hey, let's stick missing kid stickers on the rear window of cars. Or what if every Friday, instead of going out for lunch, everyone in the country donates 5 or 10 dollars to save starving kids. Or what if grocery stores had a basket next to each checkout, and you buy extra food while shopping, then place it in there to be donated? These ideas are a dime a dozen, and this 404 concept is one of the worst I've seen.

In short, everyone needs to draw the line somewhere. If someone isn't interested in changing their 404 pages, don't send the guilt trip party, because there are a million ways you could be doing more in your life. Everyone chooses to help to a different degree.

No, I don't. This kind of argument is commonly advanced, but it neglects the opportunity cost of over-saturation causing people not to pay attention or care. This is the lesson of the fable about the boy who cried wolf. Noise ends up swamping the signal.

When I notice the 'missing kids' thing on the weekly coupons that show up in my mailbox, as often as not it's some kid that disappeared 10, 15, 25 years ago. That's sad, of course, but as a practical matter it's making things worse.

Are you claiming that over saturation is worse than zero saturation?

To be honest, I can't remember the last "missing child" face I saw. If I visited Reddit today and saw a face of a kid in my state that was missing, I'd be more likely to pick them out. This program isn't getting forced by anyone but claiming it would do worse than "no good" is ignorant.

We do not have zero saturation. There are many other channels besides the 404 one suggested above.

To be honest, I can't remember the last "missing child" face I saw.

That may be because you have subconsciously stopped looking.

How many false alarms would it take to distract the department from finding a lost child?

Let me put it this way: Let's say it take 500 hours to find a child without someone calling in and 5 hours to investigate a claim.

If the website method has a success rate of 1% or less the time needed to investigate the claims outweighs the time it would take to find the child without the 404 pages at all.

I don't have any numbers for this but surely that is one scenario where this could cause more harm than good.

That would depend entirely on the cost of the initiative and what other things, including potentially more effective ways of rescuing kidnapped children, could be done instead.

That would depend entirely on the cost of the initiative and what other things,

Um, obviously. The point is that the cost is just about nothing, especially if your current 404 is an apache default or a joke page. Nobody is suggesting some type of moral obligation, but if a repurposed 404 does bring a missing child home, the cost was clearly worth it.

including potentially more effective ways of rescuing kidnapped children, could be done instead.

It's a goddamn 404 page; it's use does not preclude any other methods of recovering kidnap victims.

You're thinking of time and money costs; those are just a small part. What about the costs of being reminded of such a terrible thing every time you hit a 404? And what about those costs for people who lost their child five or ten years ago, and for whom those are just terrible memories, with no hope left?

All great points. I'm reminded of that whenever I see one of those "cleft palate" pictures. It's a terrible thing of course, but it's not exactly something that lifts your spirits and should not be forced upon people.

You make an interesting point. I could see how these 404s could be in poor taste depending on the tone of the site, but I'm not really moved by the "someone might feel bad about something they saw on the internet" argument.

Opportunity costs always exist and should never be discounted. Yes, the opportunity cost for each instance is low, but it's also being spent by a whole lot of people.

That would depend entirely on the cost of the initiative and what other things, including potentially more effective ways of rescuing kidnapped children, could be done instead.

No, that is incorrect.

The program would be regarded as successful if it rescued one child at any cost.

It is possible that there are more effective ways, but the existence of those possibilities does not preclude a less effective way of being successful.

Additionally, it seems unlikely that any other "more effective" way would be precluded by this method so it is inaccurate to measure the effectiveness of this method vs other methods ("could be done instead") - it would almost certainly be done in addition to other things.

Finally, on a personal note I believe attempting to argue that returning a kidnapped child to their parents may NOT be regarded as a success because of the "cost of the initiative" is morally indefensible.

Finally, on a personal note I believe attempting to argue that returning a kidnapped child to their parents may NOT be regarded as a success because of the "cost of the initiative" is morally indefensible.

But surely this isn't the case or each of us would personally have to dedicate all of our own time and money to finding every missing child, correct? Why aren't you using your salary to run ads on Facebook with the faces of missing children? It might work...

But surely this isn't the case or each of us would personally have to dedicate all of our own time and money to finding every missing child, correct?

No.

"Success" in this case is defined by reuniting a parent with a child. Using monetary conditions to weigh that is immoral IMHO.

However, there is no implication that anyone should spend their money in this (or any other) way. Indeed, I don't believe that there is any moral imperative to implement this on their website. That is a personal decision and is best left to the person making it.

attempting to argue that returning a kidnapped child to their parents may NOT be regarded as a success because of the "cost of the initiative" is morally indefensible.

You're saying that any and all possible attempts at finding / returning a child would have zero costs associated, or that whatever the negative cost is irrelevant and should be disregarded. Imagine the government shifts a massive amount of spending towards finding missing children, and suspends the 4th amendment, hires a massive army of investigators and searches door to door to find missing children. Of course this is an exaggerated scenario but it's at least arguable that the negative costs associated with this plan could outweigh the benefits, and that this would be morally undesirable. I don't think there is ever a scenario where costs can be completely ignored / discounted to obtain any amount of beneficial outcome. If you agree with my point in the extreme case, but not in the original scenario, then the disagreement is one of degree not principle. i.e. "well it depends on the costs.." Exactly.

I'm saying that if your "exaggerated scenario" reunited a child with their parents it would be a success. I'm not arguing that something like that should be done, nor am I arguing that cost effectiveness cannot be considered.

I am saying that given that the prior condition of successfully reuniting a child with their parent then saying it was not successful because it cost too much is putting a price on the child's life. That is morally repugnant in this circumstance.

We're just dealing with two different definitions of success here aren't we?

Success Definition One: Success occurs when the child is returned. This is a binary outcome and you're right to say that if the child is returned then it simply is a success under this definition and nothing can change that.

Success Definition Two: The scheme works and is practical. This is a qualitative outcome which does require comparing apples to oranges (or as you emotively put it; "putting a price on a child's life"). If Bill Gates offered 12 billion dollars for the return of a child, no questions asked, no law enforcement involved, it might work very well indeed, but cannot be called a success under this definition.

With regard to the 'prior condition', I would still argue that if the scenario under Two above occurred, and worked, I would still call it a failure under definition two and a success under definition one.

And honestly, definition two is the more interesting one to try to produce a solution for.

The specific wording was "great success". Not merely successful, but greatly so.

"potentially more effective ways of rescuing kidnapped children"

Agree.

Better than nothing? Ok, yes. Better than a company giving people an opportunity to monetize their 404 traffic (people do this obviously) and then taking those earnings (even if nominal) and putting it toward a cause to help children (or anything "worthy") even better.

Your answer makes me want to quit HN forever and move to the planet Mars where humans don't live.

That seems rather egoistic. Can you imagine how many children could be saved for the cost of a single mars mission?

Amusingly, I have a similar reaction as you, but to the other side of the debate.

How could you help find lost children on Mars?

Step 1: Send children to Mars

Yeah, it sure is awful when humans are able to apply logic to figure out solutions to terrible problems.

Depends. It might convince the public that the biggest threat to children is from strangers. A lot of children would be harmed by their close relatives and the general public might think there's nothing wrong.

It seems like you are saying that the effort is futile because they won't find them anyway.

It doesn't matter of they are "incredibly rare". We are talking about human lives here. If it saves one life, it's worth it.

Please read this: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=psychology-...

> When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange. What’s more, when people receive monetary offers for relinquishing a sacred value, they display a particularly striking irrationality. Not only are people unwilling to compromise sacred values for money—contrary to classic economic theory’s assumption that financial incentives motivate behavior—but the inclusion of money in an offer produces a backfire effect such that people become even less likely to give up their sacred values compared to when an offer does not include money. People consider trading sacred values for money so morally reprehensible that they recoil at such proposals.

An interesting article about human behavior. How nice. However, I don't see a categorical disproof in there of the idea that saving lives is something worth spending time and money on, so could you take a minute and connect the dots for us plebs? Thanks.

I assume zmj's point is that we implicitly make this trade-off all the time. For example, cars could be safer, but then they would be more expensive. Anytime we opt for a cheaper car with less safety features, we are making a cost-benefit analysis involving our own lives and the lives of the people who will travel in our car. (Who are probably the most important people to us.) There becomes a point where the actual gains in life-saving potential is negligible, and we don't think it is worth the cost. But we rarely state it that way.

We could easily make cars way, way safer - put a giant, sharp spike sticking out of the center of the steering wheel, pointed at the driver's heart, and forbid seatbelts. Nobody would ever go over 5mph, or put themselves at risk of crashing into anything.

This is one of the better comments I've seen lately - perfect execution of the "take the parent post's example to an absurd, irrelevant extreme and say Q.E.D."-style comment that seems to be all the rage around here lately. Love it, A+!

You have completely botched this example. This example is useful to explain why airbags increase collisions. Putting a spear in cars would not make cars safer.

I don't understand your objection. Do you see a meaningful distinction between "cars are safer" and "cars are driven more safely"?

There is a major difference. The number of traffic accidents did not change significantly from 1990 to 2009, but the number of deaths from traffic accidents dropped 23%[1]. This is most likely due to cars being built in a way so that their passengers are more likely to survive accidents.

[1]: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.p...

From http://squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html: Contrary to popular belief, you can put a dollar value on human life. That dollar value is $5.8 million. Denying this leads to terrible consequences. Let me explain.

I'm guessing these 404 pages aren't at all cost-effective. The chances of saving a life are incredibly low, and the cost of implementing and maintaining them is pretty high. Also, there's value lost to users. They'll see a missing child instead of helpful navigation suggestions.

These things sound inconsequential compared to a human life, but they add up extremely quickly. Our minds can't intuitively do the math.

A common example of trying too hard to save lives is the unintended consequences. Example: making airplanes more safe -> flights cost more -> more people opt to drive -> more people are killed in car accidents than saved by safer airplanes

Whether that fits here or not I'm not sure.

Why don't we make the speed limit 5 MPH and save a large number of the 45k deaths a year in the US? We could save thousands of lives, but it won't happen.

So, in your mind, a nearly zero cost repurposing of the 404 page is equivalent to reducing the speed limit by 75-95%? Not saying it's a good idea to apply this, but the detractors are blowing the cost way out of proportion.

We are talking about human lives here. If it saves one life, it's worth it.

Ah, one of my favorite arguments. The good 'ol, "there is no price which is too high to save a life (period, full-stop)".

Do you actually believe that? Really? Or am I just reading you wrong here?

You're absolutely right,

After all, why shall we even try to save human lives?

According to the current population growth rate[1], we have a relatively high supply of humans on earth, so anyone dying or disappearing will most definitely be replaced within a short period of time. Merge that data with the kidnapping statistics[2] and you'll see there's nothing to worry about.

Moreover, a child had likely not accomplished much in his life, so his disappearance could only affect a limited number of people.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping#Statistics

We think human lives are priceless because we like to believe that everyone is unique. There is no warranty replacement for children born defective; nor could you replace them when they break, go missing, etc.

Everyone is unique, in a sense. The real trip-up in that logic is, just because something is one-of-a-kind doesn't mean it has infinite value.

Looked at from one (unreasonable) level, everything is unique. Looked at from another (unreasonable) level, most humans could be replaced with other humans and very little would change.

There's no obvious-to-me level to look from where this argument applies to humans, but not to pet cats and dogs.

Well obviously everyone is unique in that there's only one of any given life, regardless of whether or not anyone's life is qualitatively unique. But it seems obvious (at least to me) that what's much more relevant is that as self-reflective human beings, we have a responsibility to protect other human lives, within reason. Of course, what "within reason" means is a whole subject on it's own.

That "within reason" is the key.

It would be of massive costs to change your 404, so those missing kids could suck it.

Is the cost (price) of this solution really so high though?

If you're a parent of a kidnapped child who you lost most hope of finding, what effect would seeing this on each and every 404 have? My guess is "not that great", to say the least.

If it's really that much ineffective as some are arguing, I think the costs to our mental health far outweigh the benefits.

You don't have a child, do you? Are you an only child? Would you admit it now if you are?

Why does it matter if he has a child? Because it makes a purely emotional argument less effective on him?

Talking as someone with 5 siblings (4 brothers, 1 sister), I find that one brother is generally as good as another whereas my sister is unique.

Based on this, your question of "Are you an only child?" seems only to be helpful to your argument when used against people with a relatively small amount of siblings of a particular gender. This condition is, let's be honest, a relatively new development in the first world and simply doesn't generally exist in the developing world.

Maybe this makes me a terrible person or someone with a bad photographic memory, but I literally cannot recall any missing person's face that I've seen on a billboard, a website, a milk carton, etc. even if I saw them daily. Worse, the more sites that adopt this concept, the less likely I am to remember those faces and - out of how plain awful and sad it is it is - the less likely I am to even want to spend time looking at them.

There's got to be a better way.

We've come a long way from annual telethons or weekly tithings to every spare second of everything in our lives needing to be philanthropized - including 404 pages! You know those pages in books "this page intentionally left blank" - think of all the children we could save!!!!

Over-exposure will only serve to desensitize us to worthy causes. Everything in moderation.

Ditto. I'd also imagine that if I were the loved one of such a victim, the last thing I'd want while perusing the internet is another reminder. And this isn't even getting into what the scum of the internet would/could do to exploit or otherwise vandalize these databases or the content therein.

I would argue the opposite. A lot of people don't pursue worthy causes because they're unaware of causes worth pursuing. Plus, it's only on the 404 page.

To clarify: The idea isn't that you'll remember a picture, but rather that you might recognize a child you already know.

I just think it is a slippery slope where the ratio of false leads to legitimate tips weighs too heavily on the former for this to be practical and not threatening to real families when someone wants to play the hero. I'd be interested in seeing statistics about the percentage of abductees that are allowed to be seen in public without any sort of cosmetic alterations or other such obscurations, particularly in the first few months/years. Perhaps their captors are more lazy about that than I'd assume.

What if it's not worth it? Can notfound.org keep up with increasing server loads? Do Missing Children Europe and Child Focus have adequate resources to run this project along with everything else they do? Will people become desensitized to missing children photos on 404 pages? What about all the other potential issues I'm not thinking of? Yeah launching this website is definitely a morally good action, but whether or not it will prove to have any actual positive consequence will need to be seen.

If it's that important, it shouldn't go on a 404 page (which, ideally, people won't see). You should dedicate space on all of your pages for pictures of missing kids. And escaped convicts.

We live in a world with finite resources. That means nothing is free and everything has a cost associated with it.

That means you have to think a little bit about the cost and benefit of doing something.

You cannot save all children.

We are talking about human lives here. If it saves one life, it's worth it.

That is a good sentiment, but unfortunately it's not how a lot of society works. For example, many people die of poor nutrition, or from lack of the best medical care. If the wealth of the top 30% of the population (y'know all the billionares, millionares & upper class (maybe some middle class)) was confiscated then we could save these lives. However many societies do not make this decision, for some societies & cultures, that price is too high.

The inevitable economic collapse from the warped incentives would likely cost more lives.

I did this in 2010 and reactions were mixed between "amazing idea" and "this is stupid." http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PutMissingKidsOnYour404PageEnt...

I like your implementation a lot better. It's faster, cleaner, and I (somewhat irrationally) feel better about being able to look across 5 missing faces for a match instead of just one.

It's interesting to note that of all of the "missing" kids in your screenshot.. 3 of them were teenage runaways that were found unharmed by people that knew them, and two of them were babies that were killed by their caretakers.

The 404 page of the website doesn't display any children:

http://notfound.org/404.html

Fortunately, they have a template email you can send to them:

> Copy this e-mail and send it to a friend, your ceo or your company webmaster.

> Dear www.notfound.org,

> In the European Union alone, thousands of children are still missing. They run away from conflicts at home, are the victims of parental abductions, disappear after having travelled across the EU alone, or are abducted by criminals. But there is a way you can help, namely by installing the Notfound application. By doing this, automatically, a picture of a missing child will be posted on every 404 page of your website. This is how you can help Child Focus spread a maximum number of photos and help all missing children find their way home.

> Discover the application on www.notfound.org.

lol I will send them one :D

Actually their real 404 page, e.g. http://notfound.org/something.html or http://notfound.org/404 or http://notfound.org/bla.xml do display children.

What you happened to stumble upon was an existing page called 404.html, which of course is a bit funny.

This one does: http://notfound.org/somepagethatdoesntexist

See related discussion from 3 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1148200

And as I said then:

I think the intentions behind the idea - trying to do some societal good with your web site - are great. It's just seems odd to me that the way you handle not being able to find what the user wants is by showing them something unrelated that is guaranteed to be not what they were looking for. What is the attraction to doing this on a 404 page, vs say a banner ad (as suggested elsewhere in the thread)?

I think it's supposed to be unobtrusive. Some sites don't want ads or banners, I don't want them.

I honestly do not understand all the criticism this idea is getting here on HN. 404 pages are generally just placeholders or pointers for UA's, they serve no other purpose. Yet they're pimped out more than often for no reason other than fun.

If all those pimped out 404 pages instead showed missing children, and if only ONE child was found because of this, it would be worth it. Why the criticism?

How many 404 pages have you seen today? I just looked in my Firefox history, and it appears I didn't see a single 404 page in all of August or September. So first of all, there's the question of whether you would even get any page views.

And in general, I think the HN mentality will push back against empty feel-good gestures. If this is an important issue, it deserves to be addressed prominently and in a way that will get results. Will putting a picture of a missing kid on your 404 page get any results? Wouldn't putting a picture of the same kid next to your front door be more effective?

BUT BUT BUT 404 PAGE NOT FOUND IS SORT OF LIEK CHILD NOT FOUND GET IT? huehuehue

Interesting but provides and awful and confusing user experience. Just 404 and redirect back.

Seems ridiculous for any website without a very localized userbase.

Yeah, it at least needs IP based localization.

Not really, the missing person could turn up pretty much anywhere. Even if it leads to a single success story of somebody being found, I think it would be worth doing.

Good point. In fact, you and I should go looking for missing children right now. If there's any chance at all, it's worth doing, right?

There is significant opportunity cost in dropping everything to search for missing children. There is practically no opportunity cost in changing a 404 page.

not so sure about that. With 404 pages, a user was trying to do something, and it's pretty much guaranteed that it wasn't looking for pictures of stolen children.

A task-irrelevant interruption increases the likelihood that they give up or get thrown off task, and certainly delays task completion. A 404 page is an especially bad time to distract users because they're already in the weeds.

Were I wanting to use a site to help search for missing children, I'd probably just devote some of the ad units to it.

Additionally, it induces anxiety/sadness/etc in lots of people. Some can apparently just tune it out, but some are significantly emotionally affected by this kind of thing.

You're right, they could turn up anywhere.

Problem is, the alerts are shown in Dutch and German on my french-speaking Swiss blog. I don't think my readers, when coming across a 404 while looking for something, will read "Verdwenen op 2-jarige leeftijd" and head straight to google translate to look up what it means.

What if it causes someone in, say, Massachusetts to memorize the face and name of a missing child in, say, California and doing so causes them to forget or concentrate less on some local missing child?

I don't think people have a "missing children" memory buffer like that. I might be wrong though. If anyone has links to articles on human memory segmentation it would probably be interesting.

Probably not. I'm just saying, the "if only one child is saved!" argument is flawed, and ignores things like opportunity costs.

I can't help but find 'PAGE NOT FOUND, NEITHER IS * *.' construction a bit cynical. It reads a 404 as unfortunate as a missing person.

Good motives, terrible idea.

I like the concept, but one things that springs to mind is it's a bit ugly and it's not very flexible. I know it needs to stand out, but 'd rather be able to pull the relevant info in from an API and make my own efforts to have it fit in with my own layout and still be obvious.

They certainly arn't shying away from controversy. I got an ad[1] for Madeleine McCann[2].

[1] http://cl.ly/image/1a280E0N3a2I [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Madeleine_McCa...

That first page screams "troll" to me. If not for all the context from this page I would assume it was a mean joke.

Well realistically they would be courting extreme controversy if they went on record saying they believed that Madeleine hadn't been abducted.

Interesting concept.

The actual 404 pages look like: http://notfound-static.fwebservices.be/404/index.html

Hm, it would help if the placed "Page not found" and the 404-code more prominently. If I came across this on a random website, I think I'd have a hard time realizing that this is supposed to be a 404 error page.

A 404 should render as a 404 when javascript is turned off. I understand the site itself might require javascript but the 404 should be sacred bare bones.

Yeah, the page I got was for a guy who was 42 years old. Not exactly the kid on the milk carton.

Here's an example of a live site - http://feber.se/dsf

Huh, that doesn't work for me. I tried both Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on OS X. I don't see any content from notfound.org (ie, their little iframe) in the source of the 404 page at all.

Looking beyond the merits of this particular use, this is a great idea for creating valuable backlinks to your site. I wonder what Google thinks of backlinks on 404 pages? I suspect it treats them the same as links from other pages. 404s appear when there is a bad link, and Googlebot follows all links, good and bad, so there is quite a potential here for increasing your backlinks if you can get your code on somebody's site. Wordpress plugin, perhaps? :-)

I love the philanthropic ideal that this offers but considering how many 404s I see on a daily basis, would probably become depressed by all of the lost children I'd wind up seeing.

Your webpage is supposed to be about delivering the content that your audience expects. How many websites do people go to expecting to see lost children?

There may be a small % of users hitting the 404 on their smartphones,of which an even miniscule # of users will be in the vicinity. Another alternative is that Foursquare could send a push notification for such alerts,embedded in check-in messages for users in the vicinity.

Wow, things got real quickly. I love the idea but it does seem dark and confusing.

I think it helps more the image of the site owner than the chances of these poor children to be found, (though I don't think it can hurt anything, just don't think it helps much) However hidden GPS tag (in a watch / shoes etc) on my child that only I can use to locate them in the first 3 hours, now that's a solution. Is there anything like this?

EDIT: a quick Google search suggests there is, are any of these solutions really work?

Personally, I would think that every little bit of awareness on the topic would be a good thing. In the context of a 404 message, timeliness wouldn't be quite as important as it would be for the AMBER alerts. I would liken it to the missing child photos on the backs of milk cartons. More effective as a public awareness booster than in actually finding missing children.

Here's what it looks like, so you don't have to put it on your site to find out (grabbed from the iFrame code they provide):

http://notfound-static.fwebservices.be/404/index.html?&a...

I had a similar idea, using missing kids and their names on CAPTCHAs. Won the inaugural Hack for Good award at one of Yahoo's internal hack days in 2007 ... sadly, it never shipped:

http://kentbrewster.com/captcha-for-good/

Is it just me or is there no sample page on the site? I had to go to a participating webpage and find their 404.

It's a noble idea, i don't know if 404's are an appropriate place, and i don't know if it'll have any real impact. Noble, though.

Were you able to find one? I clicked through to a couple of their "participating websites" (google.com and hilarious.be are listed), generated a 404, and got bupkis. At that point I assumed this was some sort of bizarre joke.

Their list of participating sites is mostly bogus. I think it's generated from their form which prompts users to configure a site -- this would explain the inclusion of some otherwise inexplicable "sites" like http://facebook/ (yes, no TLD) and http://example.com/.

Like you did, i just went to random participating ones and tried to get to a random page, e.g.

http://www.bonpascher.com/asdfasfsadf

http://notfound.org/lkasjdlkasjdasljk

It is great to see such creative initiative of linking these nuisances in technology to a good cause. Would it be possible to link to the location of the browser for the missing children (or adults) in that area?

It looks like there is also a 2 year old github project that does something similar: https://github.com/bluesmoon/404kids

I tried to see if they were doing it themselves. They were. But I don't understand German...

23 years old Liege / Luik Zeer slank. Zwart haar. Donkere ogen. Schoonheidsvlekje op voorhoofd.

I tried to see if they were doing it themselves. They were. But I don't understand Dutch...

23 years old Liege / Luik Zeer slank. Zwart haar. Donkere ogen. Schoonheidsvlekje op voorhoofd.

It's dutch.

"23 years old. Liege / Luik Zeer slim build. black hair. dark eyes. beauty mark on the forehead."

It says github.com is one of the sites helping. But the 404 page is still showing the jedi octocat. Is the force not strong enough with me?

What happens if the image's URL was mistyped?

...great, I already imagine starting to use this and then feeling guilty that my sites don't give enough 404s :|

Would be great of they offered an API

They do offer a API: An IFRAME. Just calling for "an API" isn't really constructive.

It'd give you more freedom to implement it in your own design.

Awesome idea and very noble. I wonder however if any users will have objections to this.

If it's "for the children" one is not allowed to object or to hold any opinion other than "that's the most excellent idea ever".

That was sarcasm, btw. Just in case that point was lost in because this is non-verbal.

Reminds me of the default HostGator 404 pages, they had ads and all profits went to charity if not mistaken.

Perhaps kidnappers.

And runaways who's parents believe their lost.

Slightly OT but where is the data coming from? Is there a missing child API somewhere?

First example I tried was for a 31 year old man. Strange definition of "child".

Neat idea. I got a Madeleine Mccann missing alert straight away.

What sites are using notforund.org?

127.0.0.1 :-/

It's a shame it's so damned ugly.

Total junk.

Campaigns like this are what's wrong with this world and the acceptance of them in general is troubling.

For the 'players' as a draw card to get customers ($), it might bring in a few I guess since the public is easily fooled by theses sort of self serving campaigns that cause more harm than good.

But ethically I couldn't do it.

If you 'really' want to help kids donate $40 to a 3rd world charity, save a real life and make you 404 professional instead.

The point of any website is to never have a 404 happen in the first place. In which case, I would feel guilty burying a missing child link in a site that would almost never show a 404 error. Might be good for a big site like facebook though. That being said "milk cartoning" is a little controversial, since it was introduced decades ago the results have been near zero.

How sad, In the samepl I refreshed like 20 times and every time it was a female. The child Ruth Breton Ortiz came up twice.

Also, the language was in either dutch or danish.

Good idea. It can be improved by showing local results based on the visitor location.

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