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