How Michael Jackson's death made search engines go crazy

When the news of Michael Jackson's death broke, it took down a lot of the Internet. TMZ, which broke the news, was the first to go. Twitter, which was responsible for spreading the news much wider, showed strain.

Other sites which went down after that included Perez Hilton's website and LA Times. Interestingly enough his death did not make the top 10 news events of all time, but at the same time caused the biggest internet slowdown since 9/11 Various internet and web traffic companies did quick studies of what the trends in traffic caused by the event tells us about the search engines and the nature of internet traffic. Didit, for example, did a study (pdf) of the implications of the web traffic trends. Keystone Systems also issued an analysis. According to Keynote Systems, a provider of on-demand mobile and Internet test and measurement solutions, the monitoring of 10 cities across the U.S. showed that a sudden rush of online demand resulted in the likes of ABC, AOL and CBS suffering a significant shortfall in service efficiency amounting to almost 10 percent of normal availability. “Beginning at 5:30pm (EDT), the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds,” outlined Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems. “During the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100% to 86%,” he added. “The index returned to normal by 9:15pm (EDT).” According to the official Google blog, the spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for. The blog also said that the search volume began to increase around 2:00pm, skyrocketed by 3:00pm, and stabilized by about 8:00pm. Many of the fastest rising search queries have been about Michael Jackson's passing. People who weren't near a computer yesterday turned to their mobile phones to check on breaking news. Google saw one of the largest mobile search spikes that they have ever seen, with 5 of the top 20 searches about the Moonwalker. One of the best blog entries I have seen on the how the news of Michael Jackson's death spread across the web is by SEOmoz's Danny Dover here. He provides a timeline of how the news spread, and how it brought down a number of websites, even ones that were thought to be immune to heavy traffic.

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