Google Mistook Jackson Searches For Net Attack 256
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."
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.
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Some websites went down... not Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Good for google. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Old news (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?
Shrug (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder (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.
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:They didn't read Google News? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure we have that here too.
Re:Good for google. (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Twitter is fragile (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats what happens when your site is based on Ruby...
Re:Good for google. (Score:1, Insightful)
They never said they couldn't handle the capacity, only that the sudden and massive increase in traffic activated their 'defenses'.
Very big difference there.
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.
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.
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.
Re:I wonder (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Good for google. (Score:3, Insightful)
As much as everyone might think this is a big boo-boo by google, I say its a great job done by automated software.
It is this kind of thing that always makes me suspicious of automated defences. These things usually generate a model of what is normal and interpret things that fall outside of normal as an attack. The problem is that sometimes the abnormal pattern that is seen is actually normal. It is completely predictable that a well known, controversial pop icon would generate a huge increase in traffic when he unexpectedly dies (he was planning a comeback concert tour). I'm not sure how an automated defence can have the contextual information necessary to make this kind of distinction between attacks and "normal" burstiness like this.
I agree that Google's software did its job, but I wouldn't call it great. Great is when they can stop attacks and not get a Slashdot article about how they screwed up when a major news event happens.
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep. Music doesn't impact anybody. Who needs culture, anyway?
Re:Am I the only one (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
There's more important things than music? That's news to me.
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good for google. (Score:1, Insightful)
Whether it was malicious or otherwise - whether or not it should be called an "attack" - it still called for a defense.
It doesn't matter if someone pushes you over, or if they just tripped into you accidentally and knocked you over, knowing how to properly break your fall is useful.
If Google did something like launch a counter offensive, yes, that would be bad. That's not what happened here. Google did right.
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Most American school systems who face budget cuts, apparently.
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:I wonder (Score:1, Insightful)
It is not at all clear to me that Google had a "problem" in the sense of not being able to handle the load. Reading the article, it almost sounds like some programmatic DDOS attack sensor went of and automatically responded by putting up the error page. This would seem to be a reasonable response to take if they actually were under some sort of massive DDOS attack and taking the action automatically might be deemed by Google to be necessary/appropriate in such a set of circumstances. The article says that Google users were getting the error page instead of actual results for Michael Jackson searches for about 25 minutes. If the decision to start responding to searches with the error page was made by a human then SURELY it would not have taken that human (i.e. someone with authority to make such a call) 25 minutes to discover that Michael Jackson had died (i.e. something pretty MAJOR in Michael Jackson land had just happened). On the other hand, if the "decision" to start responding with an error page was made automatically, one can easily imagine that there might be some delay between the time that the error page starts appearing and someone with the authority to turn it off decides to turn it off. In such a scenario, a 25 minute interval during which they responded with the error page doesn't sound all that far out of line.
Re:I wonder (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Gotta go when to go dark like Jack Bauer (Score:3, Insightful)
I literally *hid* from the news from first report through this weekend. I knew the bullshit would be enough catastrophically raise the ocean levels once it all got flushed. All I saw was a quick shot of two girls who were weeping over Jackson's death as if they just witnessed their entire families, every friend and their pets get killed in a giant fireball. Seriously, being *that* emotionally invested in a media figure has *got* to be some sort of mental illness.
So, I'm a bit out of sync. Did North Korea nuke Maui yet? ;-)
Oh, and I was on amazon looking for a book and I saw everyone was rushing to buy his albums. WTF? A musician dying makes you suddenly want to buy his album? WTF is that ghoulishness? Seriously! What mass hysteria or delusion is happening there? There's a PhD thesis waiting for someone there.
Re:I wonder (Score:2, Insightful)
Once real news is happening in home turf (see: 9/11),
You do know that people outside of North America use the Internet as well, right?