by News Editor
L. Sutherland
The death of pop legend Michael Jackson has served to illustrate just how many people now turn to the internet for information on breaking news stories. Last week, the bigmouthmedia news team covered Twitter's struggles under the pressure of fans tweeting and searching for information on the death of the superstar. However, the weekend has revealed that Twitter wasn't the only service to be affected by the sudden influx of traffic.L. Sutherland
Tech radar reports that even Google had trouble recognising the sudden traffic surge for what it was and Google News was so overwhelmed that the engine mistakenly identified the influx as an automated attack, resulting in the standard error page it returns when it believes it is under attack.
On the Official Google Blog, R. J Pittman, Director and Project Management, said: "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.
Despite the crash, Twitter and Google's coverage of the news has been admirable, although the tragedy is likely to encourage Google to invest even more heavily in creating a real time news function - a project that is already underway for the Mountain View search agency.
Unsurprisingly, Jackson's death also caused issues for Wikipedia, one of the sites that first highlighted the different ways that people search for real time news on the net. Last week, the online encyclopaedia was flooded with enough queries to return an error message for some users and the company was left struggling to decide whether to allow users to update his page as fans squabbled over the veracity of reports, continually changing the singer's status between deceased and comatose. Ultimately, Wikipedia decided to partially lock pages, displaying a message to users warning them of potential disruption.
Disappointingly, the search surge brought on by the death of the King of Pop caused cyber criminals and hackers to quickly jump on the opportunities offered by the sheer volume of users searching for information. Security company Websense highlighted the threat of new spam emails that appear to offer a Jackson related link to YouTube, but actually send the user to a Trojan Downloader hosted on a compromised web site.
Others attempted to cash in through sites such as eBay; The Sydney Herald reports that listings for Jackson related goods jumped from 1033 on Thursday to 4815 listings today. Jackson's greatest hits also saw a spik, as fans rushed to buy his albums from iTunes and Amazon, propelling the singer up best seller lists.
Sites may have initially been reeling under the strain, but it's clear that the internet is more than ready to supplant TV as the primary medium for breaking news and, judging by the vast number of people turning to computer terminals to keep updated, it looks like the general public may agree.
