Their 500 pages are just as wacky:
http://www.bloomberg.com/500 http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/500
* Frivolous about an error that's probably annoying to the audience. Not a major issue imo.
* Website Feedback link is relatively difficult to spot (but there, grey and in footer).
* Search option is relatively difficult to spot (but there, black and top right).
* Heavy (2.7MB) for a page which needs to load quickly. Not an issue for Bloomberg with their slick CDN but bad practice for most. The bulk of that is the .gif (http://cdn.gotraffic.net/business/public/images/bbiz404.3020..., c.1.6MB)
Criticisms I would actually make include:
* uh. I feel stupid for laughing so hard at it? I mean, really, it's pretty silly.
Consensus is that Bloomberg's 404 and 500 pages are quite awesome.
The new site is a visual abomination with articles having titles designed as link-bait, similar in style to Business Insider.
The new layout... there were discussions about that after it launched. I was also opposed.
Anyways, I came across this while trying to resolve their archive page links, which seems to be broken, possibly after they changed everything to businessweek.com Although a small tweak to the url can get you to the article, a better tweak takes you to this gem of a 404! :)