MJ’s death news has taken the internet by storm. Believe it or not, the web almost ceases to work when the news of MJ’s death starting to come. According to the statistics the worldwide internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours. TMZ.com actually first announced Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest and it has taken around 3 hours (Its huge in the internet age) for Google to display this piece of news in its homepage. According to the Google Blog the spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook for an automated attack. As a result for about 30 minutes when some people search Google News they saw a “We’re sorry” page. Also for some time it is not populating the desired search when searching for “Michael Jackson died”. The first search which it has displaying was about Michael Jackson, the author who died in 2007. The issue is now fixed but it is does go to show that Google’s algorithms not always understand the trends that are going on. It is not only Google but all famous news sites like CNN, TMZ, LATimes crashed out. Twitter also struggles as hundred of thousands of tweets came in very short amount of time. In Trending Topics of Twitter 9 out of 10 trends are of MJ and Twitter search seems to be running about 20 minutes behind. It was a bad day in the office for the biggies and they want to quickly forget that. They also need to take a lesson from this episode and in the future try to handle big breaking news in the real time. At last R.I.P. MJ.
Follow-Up
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:07 am
[...] So when can we expect Google(more info) and others to follow suit? I guess this should be an obvious upgrade to all the search engines since real time data is becoming such a critical player in the search arena. And Google needs the real time search juice badly especially after this. [...]