frgdr.com Blog

I have already posted an elaborate list of the top annoyances plaguing the Israeli Internet^*, but wherever my mouse takes me I encounter more and more prototypical examples:

Let’s say you want to check out the official website of the Israeli Defense Forces. You google IDF (in Hebrew in our example), and get these results:

Oh my, you hit the jackpot! The first result is exactly what you were looking for. Feeling lucky you click the first result only to receive this disappointing page:

No, 404 is not a new Israeli army unit, but the error message you get as of recent days, as someone was clever enough to wait for the page to reach Google’s number one result and only then screw up with the DNS settings.

Aside from the obvious disaster of not showing your reader the requested website, following are additional mistakes by the IDF webmasters:

• Failing to define a human-readable 404 error page, with some helpful links
• Failing to define a reporting mechanism that would raise a flag at the webmasters’ side
• Defining a folder name with CAPS is very unorthodox, and using a Hebrew word (’dover’) is an additional no no. These two methods assure your readers never remember the exact URL, making them dependent on search engine results – and we just learned how far that gets you.

If you still want to check out the IDF website, you can click here for Hebrew or click here for English:

^* For a lack of a better term, ‘Israeli Internet’ is what I call the ad-hoc collection of websites run by Israelis.