Death of The Pop King: A Special Day for Search

Thursday was a special day for search engines due to the extra traffic after the news about death of Michael Jackson came out. There were millions of people searching for information about the death of the Pop king and actress Farrah Fawcett. The news sections of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing has to take some extra measures to give the users precise answers to their queries.

As per the Google spokesperson Thursday there was an outpouring of searches about Jackson. The range of queries was diverse like “michael jackson died” to “michael jackson hoax”. The traffic was so intense that it was first interpreted as an attack. It resulted in Google showing an error page for about 25 minutes. But finally the company is happy that people do rely on the company for information.

Yahoo had a record breaking day too following the news release “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital”. In about ten minutes there were about 800,000 clicks. There was a record set with 16.4 million visitors. Yahoo took special care to send reporters to Los Angeles to report the news live. Flickr also saw a large number of Michael Jackson photo uploads.

Bing also gave special attention to the day. There was a special team of engineering, product management and marketing working on the day. But the data was not sufficient. So the results from Bing were not very satisfactory. The search always first led to the images of the Pop king and then only at the end of the page was the link to the news given.

This was not the case with just the popular search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Google. Wikipedia page also showed large changes in page views related to Michael Jackson.

Popularity: 2% [?]