Slashdot Mirror
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."
Keep in mind that every day, month and year that passes increases the ubiquitousness of web enabled devices and services (i.e. twitter, etc.) geometrically. And sad but true, celebrity foibles and deaths are and always have been more fascinating to the masses than any 'real' news.
~ Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est ~
I've seen it reported many places that Google was one of the websites that was overwhelmed by traffic resulting from Jackson's death. The fact that this is not true, and that the traffic merely activated Google's self defense mechanisms, is rather enlightening - it reveals just how much more serious Google is. However, we should hope that Google's self defense mechanisms stay this benign, else we may be in trouble when McCartney finally kicks the bucket.
As much as everyone might think this is a big boo-boo by google, I say its a great job done by automated software. All systems should protect themselves from massive peaks in internet traffic in order to provide a base-line service. Twitter even pulled selected services off to keep up a minimum working level. The fact that it classified it as a "net attack" is a matter of terminology, not importance.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
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.
Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music. The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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.
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
TMZ broke the news of his death, not the LA Times. Let's give credit where credit is due.