The story
Introduced in 2004 by Ziv Bar-Yossef et al.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
soft 404
Today it means: A 404 page (the result of trying to follow a broken link within a website) which reports a 200 OK HTTP response code rather than 404 Not Found, falsely indicating to the browser that the page exists and was loaded correctly. Full definition →