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."
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.
/. is cashing in on it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-) [Uhh, here's hoping it stays just an academic issue. :-( ]
There's a philosophy paper somewhere in that.. thanks!
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?
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.