Google - Spike In Michael Jackson Traffic Thought To Be An Attack
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As millions of users went to the Internet to find out more information about Michael Jackson, Google had a major spike in traffic, which at first appeared to be an attack. The search giant stated that Google News was unavailable to some users during this time.
A warning flashed to some user which stated:
“We’re sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”
Yahoo also thought they were under attack as well. In fact Yahoo reported that the search for information on Michael Jackson was the highest visited story in their history. No word about Bing.
Comments welcome.

8 Comments
Ryan Farmer
June 27th, 2009
at 5:52am
With tens of dozens of users in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death, Microsoft thought the Bing ads were finally paying off?
Ron Schenone
June 27th, 2009
at 6:10am
Heh Ryan - now that is funny! LOL
Ryan Farmer
June 27th, 2009
at 7:12am
The funniest part about their latest ad, “Search overload”, in which people get page after page of meaningless random crap more accurately describes Bing than any other search engine I’ve seen. (With the possible exception of Live)
By the way, did you see what IE 8 does to your blog?
http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/7237/39922794.png
IE 8 is not only not standards compliant, but isn’t even compliant with the non-standard crap supported in previous versions which Firefox handles quite well.
Ron Schenone
June 27th, 2009
at 12:11pm
Hi Ryan,
I am aware of it. MS is going to loose more share since it is not only my site that doesn’t render correctly.
Google – Spike In Michael Jackson Traffic Thought To Be An Attack … | Michael Jackson Is Dead at 50
June 27th, 2009
at 10:55pm
[...] is the original: Google – Spike In Michael Jackson Traffic Thought To Be An Attack … No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this post) Share and [...]
Buffet
June 28th, 2009
at 12:58am
At least we now know where the idea for that face came from! (scroll to sphinx photo) /item_96731.asphttp://www.oddee.comx
Buffet
June 28th, 2009
at 12:58am
/item_96731.asphttp://www.oddee.comx
How the death of Michael Jackson took down parts of the web
June 30th, 2009
at 7:38am
[...] the number of status updates in the hour after the MJ news emerged according the the LA Times. One source reports that both Google and Yahoo! both initially thought they were experiencing a cyber attack! [...]