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."
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.