Redirect the 404 urls to a search

I wouldn’t advise redirecting a 404 page – a page that doesn’t exist should return a 404 code, not a 301. A better solution would be to put the search code into your themes 404.php page. There may be plugins to do this for you, or a change to your theme may be necessary.

I did something kind of like this on my 404.php file:

<?php
  $search_term = substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],1);
  $search_404 = str_replace('/','+',$search_term);
  $search_404 = str_replace('-','+',$search_404);
  $args=array('s' => $search_404, 'post_type' => 'post', 'paged' => $paged);
  $the_query = new WP_Query( $args );
 ?>
 <?php
  if ( $the_query->have_posts() ) : 
    while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) : 
      $the_query->the_post();
        get_post_type() );
    endwhile;
  endif;
?>

It seems to work fine and give the user some help on what is happening. Pardon my coding as it’s mostly hacked from other sources ??

Hope this helps.