Blue Coat Systems Inc has teamed with software developer Barefruit Ltd to enable ISPs to provide a service that generates revenue from HTTP and DNS errors by suggesting alternative sites relevant to the original request.

The technology from London, UK-based Barefruit is a web tool that converts what would normally be a message relating to a broken web page or incorrectly entered web addresses into relevant traffic.

“It does this by capturing the 404 error message and carrying out a taxonomy analysis, then serving up a search results page, and if the user clicks on one of the links, it generates revenue which Barefruit shares with the ISP and us,” said Craig Hicks-Frazer, worldwide VP for the service provider business at Sunnyvale, California-based Blue Coat.

Barefruit finds its relevant results based on ad feeds, which in turn guarantee that any clicks generated by the service will be remunerated by the company operating the website.

Blue Coat’s involvement comes from the fact that, in order to function, the Barefruit service requires a proxy server to intercept the 404 error message and enable its replacement with the search results page instead.

While the Barefruit technology was initially developed using Squid, and open souce proxy that is freely downloadable from the internet, at a certain point it became clear that scale and ease of management mandated use of a commercial product, which is when the Blue Coat ProxySG product entered the equation.

The project has been in development for around six months, said Hicks-Frazer, with Blue Coat and Barefruit jointly targeting two customer bases, namely ISPs and mobile operators. “This is equally relevant in the mobile space, because there are a lot of server time-outs in mobile browsing,” he went on.