Slatterz writes "Web giant Google has admitted it thought the sudden spike in searches for Michael Jackson on Thursday was a massive, coordinated internet attack, leading it to post an error page on Google News. The company's director of product management, RJ Pittman, explained that search volume began to increase around 2pm PDT on Thursday and 'skyrocketed' by 3pm, finally stabilising at around 8pm. According to Pittman, last week also saw one of the largest mobile search spikes ever seen, with 5 of the top 20 searches about Jackson. Google wasn't the only site caught out by the extraordinary events. The Los Angeles Times web site also crashed soon after it broke the news of Jackson's death."
If any other news "event" has ever caused there to be such a massive amount of searching - it worries me that it is a celebrity causing this and that people aren't this into any "real" news that actually impacts them.
I don't think it's necessarily that people aren't into "real" news, I think this is one of those things that impacted a lot of people around the entire world all at the same time. As we get more and more of our news off the Internet this will become more common.
There's not a lot of news that effects everyone in the world all at once. Probably as soon as North Korea launches a nuke against someone the same thing will happen.
[quote]Probably as soon as North Korea launches a nuke against someone the same thing will happen.[/quote] The frightening thing is, I'm not so sure it will.
Sorry, but as much as I love hating humanity, I am SURE that a nuke would bring the internet to it's knees (ignoring any possible actual interruption from the nuke itself). Some one pointed out the effect that 9/11 had on the news web pages, I am fairly sure that even more people will actually care (aka, be scared silly) if a nuke finally does fly. I don't care if it is 2 countries that 'we' don't care about, we have the 'fact' drilled into our heads that the only think to come of nukes is MAD.
There's not a lot of news that effects everyone in the world all at once. Probably as soon as North Korea launches a nuke against someone the same thing will happen.
You're probably right. On Sept. 11, 2001, the news sites all ground to a halt as everyone tried to find out what was going on.
The guy could sing and dance, and now he's dead. Turn the page, y'all. There are hella more important things to search for.
The "attack" was just millions saying "I have no life, you insensitive clod!"
Google should have returned a custom error page for Michael Jackson searches - either Error 301: Moved Permanently, or Error 410: Gone would have been fine, accompanied by a "Resource Expired: Beat It!" message.
Keep in mind that every day, month and year that passes increases the ubiquitousness of web enabled devices and services (i.e. twitter, etc.) geometrically. And sad but true, celebrity foibles and deaths are and always have been more fascinating to the masses than any 'real' news.
That's because "real news" happens in Nowheresville on the other side of the world. Celebrity life affects them, because if Angelina and Brad break up who's going to act in their movies? Once real news is happening in home turf (see: 9/11), people tend to be even more reactive than they are to celebrity stuff. Even stuff like a single 8-year-old girl getting kidnapped (here in Toronto it's happened twice now at least, [Cecilia Zhang and Tori Stafford if you're interested]) gets people more riled up than a random bunch of 50-100 civilians dying in Iraq.
Well, right after the sept 11th attacks, the internets was pretty useless. I had access to a T3 at the time, and no news sites took less than a minute to reload. OTOH, when MJ died, I don't remember having trouble with any of my usual sources. Maybe Google had a problem, but neither thestar.com or the BBC did.
So maybe instead of a bad reflection on humanity, this is just a bad reflection on the current stability of the intertubes, Google in particular.
So maybe instead of a bad reflection on humanity, this is just a bad reflection on the current stability of the intertubes, Google in particular.
It actually seems to be a good reflection of the current stability of the internet. After all, it worked fine for you and most other people. Sites have gotten much better at handling heavy traffic so it is harder to bring them down. In Google's case, it wasn't so much the amount of traffic as it was misinterpreting what that traffic meant. They thought it was an attack and started playing defence instead of serving it. Once they realized the problem, they could easily handle the volume.
You don't live in Canada you live out west.... Canada is located in southern Ontario.
Didn't you know? Since the economic downturn Canada has had to move to Saskatchewan to find a job. Some of it even overflowed into Alberta. The move started in the 1800's with the building of the CPR.
When I was a freshman in college, an EE professor put a chart up on the projector. It was a fairly consistent chart with one giant spike right in the middle. He explained this was demand on the US power grid over a period of several months, and asked the class what they thought caused the giant spike...most big world events of the 90s were thrown out by the students....and they were all wrong.
The spike that put all the country's power plants at full capacity was the announcement of the OJ Simpson verdict.
If any other news "event" has ever caused there to be such a massive amount of searching - it worries me that it is a celebrity causing this and that people aren't this into any "real" news that actually impacts them.
It isn't necessarily the "impact" factor but the fact that no one expected it. It was a sudden death. He was 50 years old. This is similar to the death of Heath Ledger. When someone young dies people are going to be shocked and wonder what happened. This is also one of the reasons for an autopsy. Old people who die usually don't have an autopsy done on their bodies unless something is out of whack. Someone dying young is one of those "out of whack" things. It is a curiousity thing just like staring at a car wreck and death is something anyone can relate to.
It isn't necessarily the "impact" factor but the fact that no one expected it.
Actually, most people were probably surprised that he lasted as long as he did. With body parts falling off or changing colour, he was obviously WAY past his "best before" date.
That he died of a heart attack is just so... mundane... you'd expect it to be something like an angry parent or slipping off a balcony or a hyperbaric chamber malfunction or something involving Bubbles, a rope, and a closet.
The thing about MJ wasn't really that he died but rather the fact that he just randomly died. He was arguably one of the most popular musicians with the general crowd to die since Elvis. Many people got texts, twitter updates, Facebook updates and wondered what exactly was going on. While no one thought MJ was in amazing health, he didn't have cancer or a long illness so many assumed it was a prank so they Googled it to get the info from a reliable source.
The thing about MJ wasn't really that he died but rather the fact that he just randomly died. He was arguably one of the most popular musicians with the general crowd to die since Elvis. Many people got texts, twitter updates, Facebook updates and wondered what exactly was going on. While no one thought MJ was in amazing health, he didn't have cancer or a long illness so many assumed it was a prank so they Googled it to get the info from a reliable source.
That's the right answer.
The story is exactly relevant enough and questionable enough that it needs verification. So -everyone- verifies it.
The question should be - what about Michael Jackson's life leads people to believe that news of his death is so likely to be a prank that it must be immediately verified?
I don't think you are grasping the whole picture, and your post is modded up by the same kind of people who complain that MJ out-twittered Iran for a little while. Do you believe that we are really incapable of being concerned about multiple topics at once? I am, of course, way more concerned for the people in Iran and the conflict that is happening there than I am about MJ's death - but did I search Google after my friend came by my desk that afternoon and said, "Michael Jackson died!" - of course I did! Does that mean I don't care about the coup in Honduras or the sham trial in Burma, or about Obama's new healthcare plans? No. And frankly, that's stupid to even suggest.
You see, those other things I listed are not surprise, immediate events. Those things are not likely to have caused millions upon millions of people with internet access to suddenly, at the same time, wonder, "is that true?" I'll let you finish thinking about only this post while I go check out some pr0n, read my email, and browse some other news headlines.
If Google had read Google News, they would have known about MJs death. But Google didn't and thought they were being attacked...which led them to shutdown their news site...which would have told them about MJ.
I've seen it reported many places that Google was one of the websites that was overwhelmed by traffic resulting from Jackson's death. The fact that this is not true, and that the traffic merely activated Google's self defense mechanisms, is rather enlightening - it reveals just how much more serious Google is. However, we should hope that Google's self defense mechanisms stay this benign, else we may be in trouble when McCartney finally kicks the bucket.
Google gave users a CAPTCHA to let them proceed, and for somebody not searching for Michael Jackson news, the site worked normally. That's very different from a complete outage that affects even the non-sheeple users, or even the reduction in features that services like Twitter used to handle the load.
As much as everyone might think this is a big boo-boo by google, I say its a great job done by automated software. All systems should protect themselves from massive peaks in internet traffic in order to provide a base-line service. Twitter even pulled selected services off to keep up a minimum working level. The fact that it classified it as a "net attack" is a matter of terminology, not importance.
Welcome to last week Slashdot, I was really hoping for you guys to drum up a connection between Billy Mays and technology news. Maybe a scientific study on the effectiveness of oxi clean, or the possibility of a law limiting television volume.
from Consumerist: You have to wonder if before going to sleep last night, pitchman Billy Mays thought of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon, and said to himself one last time, "but wait, there's more!"
No big deal. Google'd be stupid not to have a procedure to deal with a real attack. The only real consequence of a false positive is that they lost a little revenue, and they got to test their response in exchange. They sorted it out in less than half an hour. Probably they'll try to improve their detection systems as a result, I guess. I can't get excited about one search topic being blocked for half an hour as a result of heavy inquiry unless that topic is "directions to the nearest bomb shelter".
Twitter's infamous 'Fail Whale' was also called into action as servers at the micro-blogging site crashed as 66,000 Tweets were made within a 60-minute period.
That's it? That's all it takes to bring Twitter to its knees? A measily 18 tweets per second? Do they manually transcribe the messages after having read that an air gap was the most effective security you could get? Or is the article plain wrong.
Sadly, I saw Ruby and Ruby On Rails refused for multiple projects because of catastrophically poor benchmark results. I mean that Java, PHP, and Perl were all totally acceptable, and Ruby disqualified itself in performance. (thousands of times difference).
If we take a step back and see what Sept. 11 did to CNN and now The Times website, we can see that the internet can suffer from its own major over-subscription of users to servers/services. Particularly in times of significant current events when almost every connencted user demands information from authoritative sources.
And I'm sure the audience here is no stranger to the Slashdot/Schumaker-Levey effect?
There needs to be a blend between the ability of peer to peer protocols (bittorrent?) to service and distribute massive amounts of content and HTTP. Such technology would permit the audience (or data sinks) to service itself in times of major crisis and permit the important information to reach people.
"The Los Angeles Times web site also crashed soon after it broke the news of Jackson's death."
It was actually TMZ.com that "broke" the news, many minutes before anyone else. The other news sites waited until someone they considered "legitimate" reported it before accepting it as fact. I guess they were trying to avoid a "Dewey defeats Truman" moment...
I keep reading comments that it is "a sad state of affairs" that news of a celebrity's death has garnered much more response from the world then, say, news of a recent scientific breakthrough.
The fact of the matter is, Michael Jackson is one of the most recognized persons in the world, and for quite a long time too. So what if he has contributed nothing/little to science? You think without music, art, and other culture we would be the same human beings? Art and music define us and advance us as much as science - why else would cavemen draw?
So what if so-and-so was responsible for inventing solar-power, or discovered water on mars. That isn't affecting the majority of the poor population in Bangladesh. Yet, they ALL listen to Michael Jackson.
"The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated."
I think current events prove it can be. Or at least overhyped. He was a talented guy, but he was a musician. He's not Einstein. His contribution to society is really not that significant.
In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.
I like music as much as anyone, but it's important to put it into perspective. It's important always to remember it a commercial product and owned by one of the most unethical industries on Earth. A
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 29, @02:00AM (#28510807)
He was a talented guy, but he was a musician. He's not Einstein.
See, this I find disturbing.
I understand this is slashdot where the sciences are valued above the arts, but that doesn't mean that the arts aren't a significant part of societal development as well.
In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.
And so too will Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovitch, Joplin, Sousa, and so on.
Oh wait.
Yes, I am comparing them with those composers. The music is different and less complex. Doesn't mean it's not good stuff.
Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music.
Maybe that's why I pretty much stopped listening to American music in the early 1990s.
I thought he was a crazy, drugged-out pederast. My wife was in tears.
I'm not particularly dismayed by the reaction of some here - to each his own. I *am* dismayed that Farrah Fawcett, who died on the same day, never got any mention here.
I find it fascinating that with all his debt issues, he was surrounded by Nation of Islam financial advisors, the same as Kareem (who ended his Hall Of Fame basketball career broke).
Well, I suppose that depends on how you estimate the importance of modern music, doesn't it?
Regardless of your personal opinion of the artistic merits of Jackson's work, there's no denying he had a massive effect on American pop culture, and tens of millions of Americans.
I wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
There's not a lot of news that effects everyone in the world all at once. Probably as soon as North Korea launches a nuke against someone the same thing will happen.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
[quote]Probably as soon as North Korea launches a nuke against someone the same thing will happen.[/quote]
The frightening thing is, I'm not so sure it will.
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but as much as I love hating humanity, I am SURE that a nuke would bring the internet to it's knees (ignoring any possible actual interruption from the nuke itself). Some one pointed out the effect that 9/11 had on the news web pages, I am fairly sure that even more people will actually care (aka, be scared silly) if a nuke finally does fly. I don't care if it is 2 countries that 'we' don't care about, we have the 'fact' drilled into our heads that the only think to come of nukes is MAD.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
What does everyone have against Hawaii? They have naked women and flowers. And they already got the short end of the stick in 41.
Why not nuke Kansas or Ohio? THat'll improve the IQ and educational system while only killing 2 men and a donkey.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
You're probably right. On Sept. 11, 2001, the news sites all ground to a halt as everyone tried to find out what was going on.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
It's as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
The "attack" was just millions saying "I have no life, you insensitive clod!"
Google should have returned a custom error page for Michael Jackson searches - either Error 301: Moved Permanently, or Error 410: Gone would have been fine, accompanied by a "Resource Expired: Beat It!" message.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
So maybe instead of a bad reflection on humanity, this is just a bad reflection on the current stability of the intertubes, Google in particular.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
So maybe instead of a bad reflection on humanity, this is just a bad reflection on the current stability of the intertubes, Google in particular.
It actually seems to be a good reflection of the current stability of the internet. After all, it worked fine for you and most other people. Sites have gotten much better at handling heavy traffic so it is harder to bring them down. In Google's case, it wasn't so much the amount of traffic as it was misinterpreting what that traffic meant. They thought it was an attack and started playing defence instead of serving it. Once they realized the problem, they could easily handle the volume.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Informative)
You don't live in Canada you live out west.... Canada is located in southern Ontario.
Didn't you know? Since the economic downturn Canada has had to move to Saskatchewan to find a job. Some of it even overflowed into Alberta. The move started in the 1800's with the building of the CPR.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
When I was a freshman in college, an EE professor put a chart up on the projector. It was a fairly consistent chart with one giant spike right in the middle. He explained this was demand on the US power grid over a period of several months, and asked the class what they thought caused the giant spike...most big world events of the 90s were thrown out by the students....and they were all wrong.
The spike that put all the country's power plants at full capacity was the announcement of the OJ Simpson verdict.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
If any other news "event" has ever caused there to be such a massive amount of searching - it worries me that it is a celebrity causing this and that people aren't this into any "real" news that actually impacts them.
It isn't necessarily the "impact" factor but the fact that no one expected it. It was a sudden death. He was 50 years old. This is similar to the death of Heath Ledger. When someone young dies people are going to be shocked and wonder what happened. This is also one of the reasons for an autopsy. Old people who die usually don't have an autopsy done on their bodies unless something is out of whack. Someone dying young is one of those "out of whack" things. It is a curiousity thing just like staring at a car wreck and death is something anyone can relate to.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, most people were probably surprised that he lasted as long as he did. With body parts falling off or changing colour, he was obviously WAY past his "best before" date.
That he died of a heart attack is just so ... mundane ... you'd expect it to be something like an angry parent or slipping off a balcony or a hyperbaric chamber malfunction or something involving Bubbles, a rope, and a closet.
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing about MJ wasn't really that he died but rather the fact that he just randomly died. He was arguably one of the most popular musicians with the general crowd to die since Elvis. Many people got texts, twitter updates, Facebook updates and wondered what exactly was going on. While no one thought MJ was in amazing health, he didn't have cancer or a long illness so many assumed it was a prank so they Googled it to get the info from a reliable source.
That's the right answer.
The story is exactly relevant enough and questionable enough that it needs verification. So -everyone- verifies it.
The question should be - what about Michael Jackson's life leads people to believe that news of his death is so likely to be a prank that it must be immediately verified?
Parent
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
You see, those other things I listed are not surprise, immediate events. Those things are not likely to have caused millions upon millions of people with internet access to suddenly, at the same time, wonder, "is that true?" I'll let you finish thinking about only this post while I go check out some pr0n, read my email, and browse some other news headlines.
Parent
They didn't read Google News? (Score:5, Funny)
If Google had read Google News, they would have known about MJs death. But Google didn't and thought they were being attacked...which led them to shutdown their news site...which would have told them about MJ.
What if this had happened in Soviet Russia?
Re:They didn't read Google News? (Score:5, Funny)
Michael Jackson would've attacked YOU with "google news" queries!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What if this had happened in Soviet Russia?
it'd be google.ru instead of google.com
Re:They didn't read Google News? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure we have that here too.
It was actually the work of... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It was actually the work of... (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly the boogie is to blame.
Parent
Some websites went down... not Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Some websites went down... not Google (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Good for google. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for google. (Score:5, Funny)
Do you really want to admit that? Wouldn't it be better to claim you were searching for, I don't know, porn or something?
Parent
Re:Good for google. (Score:5, Funny)
Do you really want to admit that? Wouldn't it be better to claim you were searching for, I don't know, porn or something?
Getting the Michael Jackson captcha while searching for porn?
I don't even want to know what those search terms entailed... but I assume the FBI picked them up, too.
Parent
Welcome to Last Week (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Welcome to Last Week (Score:5, Funny)
from Consumerist:
You have to wonder if before going to sleep last night, pitchman Billy Mays thought of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon, and said to himself one last time, "but wait, there's more!"
Parent
Shrug (Score:5, Insightful)
He's not dead! (Score:4, Funny)
Twitter is fragile (Score:5, Insightful)
That's it? That's all it takes to bring Twitter to its knees? A measily 18 tweets per second? Do they manually transcribe the messages after having read that an air gap was the most effective security you could get? Or is the article plain wrong.
Seriously confused here.
Re:Twitter is fragile (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats what happens when your site is based on Ruby...
Parent
Re:Twitter is fragile (Score:4, Interesting)
Sadly, I saw Ruby and Ruby On Rails refused for multiple projects because of catastrophically poor benchmark results. I mean that Java, PHP, and Perl were all totally acceptable, and Ruby disqualified itself in performance. (thousands of times difference).
Glad I never wasted time learning it.
Parent
Peer-to-peer protcols as a solution to demand (Score:4, Interesting)
And I'm sure the audience here is no stranger to the Slashdot/Schumaker-Levey effect?
There needs to be a blend between the ability of peer to peer protocols (bittorrent?) to service and distribute massive amounts of content and HTTP. Such technology would permit the audience (or data sinks) to service itself in times of major crisis and permit the important information to reach people.
As far as "breaking the news"... (Score:4, Informative)
It was actually TMZ.com that "broke" the news, many minutes before anyone else. The other news sites waited until someone they considered "legitimate" reported it before accepting it as fact. I guess they were trying to avoid a "Dewey defeats Truman" moment...
TMZ Broke the news (Score:5, Insightful)
TMZ broke the news of his death, not the LA Times. Let's give credit where credit is due.
Why shouldn't MJ generate such a big response? (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep reading comments that it is "a sad state of affairs" that news of a celebrity's death has garnered much more response from the world then, say, news of a recent scientific breakthrough.
The fact of the matter is, Michael Jackson is one of the most recognized persons in the world, and for quite a long time too. So what if he has contributed nothing/little to science? You think without music, art, and other culture we would be the same human beings? Art and music define us and advance us as much as science - why else would cavemen draw?
So what if so-and-so was responsible for inventing solar-power, or discovered water on mars. That isn't affecting the majority of the poor population in Bangladesh. Yet, they ALL listen to Michael Jackson.
Get over it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Non-news for most of the world. Every major broadcaster had this a few days ago. What is the point of having it here?
Re:Old news (Score:5, Funny)
Even Fox News had the information on Friday.
Slashdot: Slower Than Fox News.
Parent
Re:Am I the only one (Score:5, Insightful)
Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music. The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think current events prove it can be. Or at least overhyped. He was a talented guy, but he was a musician. He's not Einstein. His contribution to society is really not that significant.
In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.
I like music as much as anyone, but it's important to put it into perspective. It's important always to remember it a commercial product and owned by one of the most unethical industries on Earth. A
Re:Am I the only one (Score:4, Insightful)
He was a talented guy, but he was a musician. He's not Einstein.
See, this I find disturbing.
I understand this is slashdot where the sciences are valued above the arts, but that doesn't mean that the arts aren't a significant part of societal development as well.
In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.
And so too will Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovitch, Joplin, Sousa, and so on.
Oh wait.
Yes, I am comparing them with those composers. The music is different and less complex. Doesn't mean it's not good stuff.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music.
Maybe that's why I pretty much stopped listening to American music in the early 1990s.
I thought he was a crazy, drugged-out pederast. My wife was in tears.
I'm not particularly dismayed by the reaction of some here - to each his own. I *am* dismayed that Farrah Fawcett, who died on the same day, never got any mention here.
I find it fascinating that with all his debt issues, he was surrounded by Nation of Islam financial advisors, the same as Kareem (who ended his Hall Of Fame basketball career broke).
Now,
Re:Am I the only one (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless of your personal opinion of the artistic merits of Jackson's work, there's no denying he had a massive effect on American pop culture, and tens of millions of Americans.
Parent