Michael Jackson's Death and Search Engines Respond

June 26th, 2009 was a shocking day for Search Engines that the news of Michael Jackson's Death passed very speedy through across the Web. The events of Thursday demonstrated that Google is declining behind in the emerging real-time web. It was 3 hours and 17 minutes after TMZ first declared Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest before it appeared as an auto completion suggestion on Google's homepage. In the technology age that is a huge amount of time. During 3 hours and 17 minutes newbie searchers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want.

It was impressed by the speed of information distribution and very surprised to see which site posted the news first. Wikipedia is still the fastest news aggregator. It was quicker than Twitter and much faster than Google.

Google official representatives responded to complaints of the Google News delay with the following explanation:

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.

For more info about Google official visits…
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/outpouring-of-searches-for-late-michael.html

Here I only considered Google search engine because about 64% of total U.S. search share is captured by Google. Yahoo is only around 17%, MSN/Bing is around 10% and the rest is captured by all other search engines and associated.