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."

Old news

[game kid]

It's Sunday; the death occurred on Thursday and Google blogged on the "attack" problem on Friday [blogspot.com].

RIP Michael

[Anonymous Coward]

How awesome is this video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmN0dwDR1wo [youtube.com]

Michael Jackson lives!!

Re:Am I the only one

[owlnation]

"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. All commercial music is overhyped. Most musicians are overrated. You may like them, I may like them, but most of them are only good at what they do and are far from masters of their instruments. Most music does not stand the test of time.

Jackson's music will last longer than most of his peers. But he isn't Wyld Stallions, he won't be creating world peace and new harmony. It's just music.

It's truly astonishing that (considering his legal history too) he has created this much hype in death. So much so that, even /. is cashing in on it.

It makes me realize that there's something fundamentally wrong with how things are valued, and how page views and impressions are the currency of the net. Waves of hype like this are not truly as valuable as people seem to think they are.

Re:Am I the only one

[SL Baur]

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, get off my lawn and take that "King of Pop" trash with you.

Peer-to-peer protcols as a solution to demand

[rob101]

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.

Re:I wonder

[selven]

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.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Now that is a glorious bit of irony. ARPANet was inspired to maintain communication in the event of nuclear war, and the end result will be that there are so many people with internet access during a nuclear strike that the traffic volume will disable itself.
There's a philosophy paper somewhere in that.. thanks! :-) [Uhh, here's hoping it stays just an academic issue. :-( ]

Re:I wonder

[KamuZ]

It actually seems to be a good reflection of the current stability of the internet

That reminds me the last time i tried to use my cellphone to call my relatives after an earthquake, impossible, it was only 2 years ago or so. We will see (hopefully not) when something really bad happens how the net behaves. Probably like in 9/11, we will only get text news pages. What i am worried is twitter, probably won't make it and if they did, who knows the kind of misinformation it will deliver to people... not that actual news are 100% accurate either... *sigh*

Re:Twitter is fragile

[Solandri]

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?

For the record, when the MJ news was at its peak, the volume was more like 1000+ tweets per second on Michael Jackson alone, so I have no idea how the article got those numbers

66,000 tweets per minute would give you 1100 tweets per second. So likely someone misheard or misspoke 66,000 tweets per minute as 66,000 tweets per hour.

Re:I wonder

[treat]

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?

Re:Twitter is fragile

[treat]

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.

Regine Velasquez the next Michael Jackson?

[SL Baur]

Have you ever even heard his music?

Yes, and your point is? Have you ever heard the music of TAKAHASHI Mariko, or Regine Velasquez? They have voices that sound like angels, to my ears. Sadly, Regine is headed down the same road Michael Jackson apparently took.

I heard his music and I didn't like it. My wife loves his music and there is no bloody way I'm going to kick her out of bed for that.

I liked "We are the world" the first time I heard it, though it grew tedious after awhile. It took on a whole new meaning after his trials in California, "We are the world, I sleep with your children".

I *will* feel some sadness when Regine Velasquez dies of a drug overdose or something along those lines, but I will not be surprised and neither will it bother me. It's her life as Michael Jackson's life was his own.

Worked fine

[S-100]

When the MJ news first hit, one of the early sites handling the rumor was TMZ.COM. I was on the page before CNN and other sources had reported MJ dead. The TMZ page automatically loaded a streaming video window with live reports of the ongoing story. I left the page open while I attended to other matters, and other than the video blanking out now and then, the stream was stable for hours. I was thinking to myself that surely this story would overload their servers, what with the home page automatically generating a live video stream, but it just never happened.

Re:I wonder

[XorNand]

That's a common misconception.

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.

"A Brief History of the Internet [isoc.org]", Internet Society.

Cached responses

[JerryQ]

I wonder whether Google will develop, or have developed, a cached response mechanism for situations such as this. There would seem little point, during a massive spike, in actually loading the servers with the search element of these queries. I know it's what I would do. why would you not do so? I ask because, as a designer, I would be interested in what the /. ers would think to be the pros and cons of that.