Google feared attack over Michael Jackson searches

Fri, 26/06/2009 - 14:21 — Barrie Smith

Leading search engine, Google feared it was under attack when news first broke over the death of pop icon Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson Google Trends Instead of receiving a list of results when searching for the 750 million record selling star, they were returned with an error page warning users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application", which requires typing in the CAPCHA code provided to pass by and get to the results page. This occurred between 10.40pm and 11.15pm GMT.

The Google trends graph to the right shows the spike in searches, in which their "hotness" meter has described as "volcanic".

Google was not the only site to have issues regarding the frequency of Michael Jackson searches. Microblogging service, Twitter crashed due to the number of users tweeting around the same time.

This full news article can be found over at the bbc.

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Comments

The algorithmic approach

Fri, 26/06/2009 - 21:21 — Andy Langton

To me, this suggests a few of the significant problems in Google's decision to automate seemingly huge swathes of the way they operate. The "michael jackson" searches were a huge spike in activity - not something that happens very often. Not serving results pages is about the worst case scenario for Google, and this incident is something a person could have identified in minutes as genuine activity.

I was actually one of the people searching for Jackson around that time, but then, I'm pretty used to the "we're sorry" page by now. It's easy to trip the anti-bot mechanism if you use a lot of search operators ;)