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 any other news "event" has ever caused there to be such a massive amount of searching - it worries me that it is a celebrity causing this and that people aren't this into any "real" news that actually impacts them.
It's Sunday; the death occurred on Thursday and Google blogged on the "attack" problem on Friday.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
This is all so confusing!
If Google had read Google News, they would have known about MJs death. But Google didn't and thought they were being attacked...which led them to shutdown their news site...which would have told them about MJ.
What if this had happened in Soviet Russia?
a smooth criminal.
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."
Welcome to last week Slashdot, I was really hoping for you guys to drum up a connection between Billy Mays and technology news. Maybe a scientific study on the effectiveness of oxi clean, or the possibility of a law limiting television volume.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
No big deal. Google'd be stupid not to have a procedure to deal with a real attack. The only real consequence of a false positive is that they lost a little revenue, and they got to test their response in exchange. They sorted it out in less than half an hour. Probably they'll try to improve their detection systems as a result, I guess. I can't get excited about one search topic being blocked for half an hour as a result of heavy inquiry unless that topic is "directions to the nearest bomb shelter".
The media is just overreacting. He's just on Betelgeuse with Elvis.
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."
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.
Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music. The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated.
Well, I suppose that depends on how you estimate the importance of modern music, doesn't it?
sic transit gloria mundi
I guess so. Did your parents lock you in a cave as a kid or something?
He's a 7 digit, my friend. MJ hasn't made any new truly popular music for a long time, so GP has only seen the mutilated face, the pedophilia, and the baby-dangling.
"The Los Angeles Times web site also crashed soon after it broke the news of Jackson's death."
It was actually TMZ.com that "broke" the news, many minutes before anyone else. The other news sites waited until someone they considered "legitimate" reported it before accepting it as fact. I guess they were trying to avoid a "Dewey defeats Truman" moment...
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls
Regardless of your personal opinion of the artistic merits of Jackson's work, there's no denying he had a massive effect on American pop culture, and tens of millions of Americans.
Now let's see if all the infomercials crash tonight due to the sudden death of Billy Mays.
Of course, I'm not trying to deny that at all. I'm just saying that if it wasn't him, somebody else would've won the "superstardom" lottery, it's not like we'd end up with no music to listen to.
sic transit gloria mundi
TMZ broke the news of his death, not the LA Times. Let's give credit where credit is due.
I keep reading comments that it is "a sad state of affairs" that news of a celebrity's death has garnered much more response from the world then, say, news of a recent scientific breakthrough.
The fact of the matter is, Michael Jackson is one of the most recognized persons in the world, and for quite a long time too. So what if he has contributed nothing/little to science? You think without music, art, and other culture we would be the same human beings? Art and music define us and advance us as much as science - why else would cavemen draw?
So what if so-and-so was responsible for inventing solar-power, or discovered water on mars. That isn't affecting the majority of the poor population in Bangladesh. Yet, they ALL listen to Michael Jackson.
Get over it.
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
Have you ever even heard his music?
Yes, and your point is? Have you ever heard the music of TAKAHASHI Mariko, or Regine Velasquez? They have voices that sound like angels, to my ears. Sadly, Regine is headed down the same road Michael Jackson apparently took.
I heard his music and I didn't like it. My wife loves his music and there is no bloody way I'm going to kick her out of bed for that.
I liked "We are the world" the first time I heard it, though it grew tedious after awhile. It took on a whole new meaning after his trials in California, "We are the world, I sleep with your children".
I *will* feel some sadness when Regine Velasquez dies of a drug overdose or something along those lines, but I will not be surprised and neither will it bother me. It's her life as Michael Jackson's life was his own.
When the MJ news first hit, one of the early sites handling the rumor was TMZ.COM. I was on the page before CNN and other sources had reported MJ dead. The TMZ page automatically loaded a streaming video window with live reports of the ongoing story. I left the page open while I attended to other matters, and other than the video blanking out now and then, the stream was stable for hours. I was thinking to myself that surely this story would overload their servers, what with the home page automatically generating a live video stream, but it just never happened.
He was a talented guy, but he was a musician. He's not Einstein.
See, this I find disturbing.
I understand this is slashdot where the sciences are valued above the arts, but that doesn't mean that the arts aren't a significant part of societal development as well.
In 10 years he'll fade, just as Lennon and Elvis have too.
And so too will Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovitch, Joplin, Sousa, and so on.
Oh wait.
Yes, I am comparing them with those composers. The music is different and less complex. Doesn't mean it's not good stuff.
I literally *hid* from the news from first report through this weekend. I knew the bullshit would be enough catastrophically raise the ocean levels once it all got flushed. All I saw was a quick shot of two girls who were weeping over Jackson's death as if they just witnessed their entire families, every friend and their pets get killed in a giant fireball. Seriously, being *that* emotionally invested in a media figure has *got* to be some sort of mental illness.
So, I'm a bit out of sync. Did North Korea nuke Maui yet? ;-)
Oh, and I was on amazon looking for a book and I saw everyone was rushing to buy his albums. WTF? A musician dying makes you suddenly want to buy his album? WTF is that ghoulishness? Seriously! What mass hysteria or delusion is happening there? There's a PhD thesis waiting for someone there.
I wonder whether Google will develop, or have developed, a cached response mechanism for situations such as this. There would seem little point, during a massive spike, in actually loading the servers with the search element of these queries. I know it's what I would do. why would you not do so? I ask because, as a designer, I would be interested in what the /. ers would think to be the pros and cons of that.
Just launch a topic into the internets that is so interesting that the server[s] you wish to attack will presume that a DoS attack is in progress. Maybe via some sort of semi-popular forum....