Google Mistook Jackson Searches For Net Attack

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."

Re:Some websites went down... not Google

[644bd346996]

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.

Re:It was actually the work of...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to ask if you'd seen that joke was already used in the grandparent and then I noticed the usernames involved. Oh, what the hell:

Did you see that joke was already made by the GP?

This is slashdot, after all. The editors accidentally put up dupes, so I expect some users do too.

Re:Good for google.

[FishWithAHammer]

So, you're a fucking retard, huh?

Google News had no capacity or throughput issues. It thought that it was a distributed denial of service attack and forced users searching for Michael Jackson to enter a captcha. I know, I saw it.

Re:I wonder

[agilen]

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.

Re:Am I the only one

[glwtta]

Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music. The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated.

Well, I suppose that depends on how you estimate the importance of modern music, doesn't it?

As far as "breaking the news"...

[I_am_Syrinx]

"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...

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

The spike that put all the country's power plants at full capacity

I doubt that. More plausibly, each point was the cumulative total for the day, and extra TVs turned on during the day, in addition to normal evening use, accounted for the spike. If the graph showed the full year, you'd probably see a much larger increase in the summer for air conditioner usage, which certainly has been known to cause brownouts.

Re:I wonder

[Evil Shabazz]

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.

Re:I wonder

[Keybase]

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.

Re:I wonder

[node 3]

That he died of a heart attack is just so ... mundane

Cardiac arrest is not the same as a heart attack. Cardiac arrest is when the heart just stops, a heart attack is when the heart stops receiving blood/oxygen (as ironic as that sounds).

Re:They didn't read Google News?

[nidarus]

What if this had happened in Soviet Russia?

it'd be google.ru instead of google.com

If Soviet Russia still existed, there would be no .ru TLD - it would be google.su

Re:I wonder

[jonbryce]

I think the reason a lot of people searched Google News is because they heard about it and weren't sure if it was true or not. If someone wanted to spread an untrue rumour about something, this is the sort of subject they would choose.

I searched Google News for that reason, and when I saw it was reported on news sources that are usually reliable for that type of news, like BBC and Sky News, I then believed it was true.

Also, like a million or so other people, I have tickets for his show in London next month, so it does impact me.