Google News mistakes Jackson queries for attack

June 27, 2009 · Filed Under News · Comment

After the shocking and sudden reports on Michael Jackson’s death, a flurry of search queries for the King of the Pop led Google News, the news aggregator of Web search giant Google, to believe it was under an attack, Google said at its official blog on Friday.

The Internet giant said on Friday that as “millions and millions” of people across the globe sent in search and news queries for the pop star on Thursday, Google hesitated a bit initially believing that it was under an automated virus attack, rating the “hotness” of Jackson-related searches as “volcanic.”

“The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack,” Google said. The official blog post also added, “As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a ‘We’re sorry’ page before finding the articles they were looking for.”

As the reports about the hospitalization and death of the pop star, millions of shocked fans across the globe couldn’t believe the news and searched for reliable sources on the internet.
Amongst the other web-based services who suffered a lowdown were the popular micro-blogging service Twitter, web portal AOL, and Yahoo!

Twitter suffered a slowdown as millions of shocked fans and even celebrities across the globe expressed their shock and emotions on the sudden development. AOL’s AIM instant messaging service was down for about 40 minutes.
Yahoo! said it received five times its normal traffic and its front page story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was its “highest clicking story” ever with 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes.

Tags: AOL, Google, Google News, King of Pop, Michael Jackson, search engine, slowdown, virus attack, Yahoo

Google introduces ads to Google News in US

February 27, 2009 · Filed Under Advertising, Business, News · 1 Comment

In its effort to convert itself into a money making website from news amassment, search engine giant Google will now introduce ads to the results of search queries on Google News, a business project manager at Google, Josh Cohen announced at the official Google News blog on Wednesday.

Google News accumulates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources around the world and provides links to articles on their websites. However, Google’s this profit venture is bound to raise the hackles of newspapers and other media outlets.

Cohen wrote on the blog, “What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you’ll see text ads alongside your News search results — similar to what you see on regular Google searches.”

“We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike. We’ll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too,” Cohen added further, mentioning that the ads would appear on Google News search-results the USA only.

Google earns the maximum from the internet search advertising. Lately it has also introduced advertising to YouTube, Google Maps and Google Finance.

Google since purchasing YouTube in 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars has been searching for ideas to transform the immense popularity into profit-earning venture without affecting its huge support system.

Google also signed a licensing agreement in April 2007 with Agence France-Presse earning the right to post AFP news and photos on Google News.

This announcement has received mixed responses so far. John Battle, a media analyst writes on his blog, battellemedia.com, that the introduction of ads to Google News search was likely to prove controversial.

Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based non-profit journalism school feels, “I presume that Google gets paid per click for action on those ad offerings. But I doubt that they have any particular plans to share that with the people whose news they’re aggregating.”

Kelly McBride, another Poynter faculty member remarks, “It’s always been obvious that Google didn’t develop Google News as a public service — they intended to make money off it. I’m OK with Google News making money,” hoping that Google share the profit with the content providers.

Tags: Agence France-Presse, Google, Google News, search engine