Google mistakes Jackson queries for attack

Google mistakes Jackson queries for attack

www.abc.net.au

A deluge of search queries for Michael Jackson led Google News, the news aggregator of Web search engine Google, to initially believe it was under attack, the internet giant said on Friday (local time).

Google, in a blog post on the company website, said that "millions and millions" of people around the world begin searching for news about the pop star on Thursday as reports emerged about his hospitalisation and death.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
www.wired.com
digg.com
ca.news.yahoo.com
www.nydailynews.com

[edit on 26-6-2009 by Oatmeal]

Wow, so many people Googled Michael Jackson that the company thought they were "under attack." Apparently Twitter crashed. I wonder who they may have thought were attacking them? I recall yesterday some posters saying they were getting the "We're Sorry" page, I guess this explains it. They just couldn't handle the volume, which goes to show what kind of following Michael Jackson really had and just proves that if enough people get together and decide they want to raise hell on Google that it can be done...

www.abc.net.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 26-6-2009 by Oatmeal]

Oh, so Google isn't invincible after all

reply to post by Oatmeal


Yeah, I noticed both we're down, even youtube!

Well we all know MJ was well loved!!! If he was alive, I bet he'd appreciate that!!

I hope when I die google crashes from the extreme intake of searches of me!

That's got to be one of the dumbest things I've heard.
An attack.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize the passing of Michael would cause such a commotion.

Talk about a *duh* moment.

Thanks for the post!

reply to post by silo13

That's got to be one of the dumbest things I've heard. An attack.

That's what I thought, who did they think was attacking them? Did they alert the F.B.I. and Homeland Security? Did they call Obama, The Minute Men or ACLU?

It's not as far fetched as it sounds. There's something called a distributed denial of service attack, which is essentially infected computers from all across the internet querying the same server at the same time with the intention of bringing it down; which is exactly what this looked like.

I can vouch that the system was down, we had people scrambling all over the place trying to send results in on a local NBA draft pick and some wound up driving back to Orlando from his party to send info in. You can crash the Internet through excessive use, it has happened in past, but it may have been combos of search terms that alerted them.

do google panic much ????

i too am utterly incredulous that they could mistake the " internet frenzy " following mr jacksons death for a DOS attack

FFS - he was one of the biggest selling preformers on the planet - and his death was reported as a confirmed fact on all bona-fide news channels

how the heck did they expect the online population to react ??????

I think what worries me the most about this and whats happened since MJ died in the past day. Is the fact that it shows how easy it could actually be to bring down the internet. Sadly in America we're falling behind the other countries in developing our networks and maintaining them. In the very late 90's we certainly had it made. Things have changed so much in technology in 10 years that we've just been too lazy to catch up. This complacency towards technology will ultimately be our undoing. Even Carl Sagan felt this way.

I don't find it stupid really that they'd think they were under attack. Consider this. You're a network admin sitting at your desk doing your work. Then suddenly boom your servers just went from an avg of 20% system utilization to 100% for a while. You try and do some load balancing to distribute the load to others server but find everything is now suddenly at or near 100%. That certainly raises security flags at first until you do realize the news of whats happened when you're sitting in an office or whatever.

It wasn't just Google either as people have said Youtube, Twitter and other sites went down momentarily because of the traffic. Hell with so many people on the internet suddenly trying to view videos, music and what not of MJ just accessing a regular website had delays.

The state of internet after the news I thought was a fantastic tribute to MJ in itself. How many people are there on earth whose demise would cause that to happen. Awsome.

Not so awsome is the reality it brought to myself that if died right now I don't think anybody would even notice... well ok maybe the wife.

reply to post by Oatmeal


ye dude, twitter did crash, but it was litrely only for lik e5 minutes, i dont think it was crashed as such, as it just displayed a "sorry, we are very busy" message.

They thought it was an attack? So all this talk about cyberwar is actually possible? Hmm how many people rely on the internet for work, paying bills, shopping, communicating and current events? Geez if the interent did crash then it is safe to say chaos would ensue especially if for some reason satelites malfunctioned and cell phone networks dropped service. I bet the people who frequent ATS would flip the fxxx out hahahahahaha wait I probably should not joke about that.


Posted Via ATS Mobile: m.abovetopsecret.com

It would be interesting to see the logs on all this, I suspect it was a rapid spike in search queries that probably tripped off early warning systems. Generally speaking its rather odd to see say 50 million people all start searching for "Michael Jackson" at the exact same time, usually you would notice a fast buildup but almost instantaneous is a little out of place. I do believe what we are seeing now is the advent of text messaging allowing for news to travel faster than ever before so system that detect incoming DoS attacks are probably going to need an overhaul to account for this.

Im almost positive what they mean is the computer system thought it was under attack . It probably started filtering searches down to a manageable level ..

BTW google does not = "the internet" The rest of the net was fine . Just one websites security kicked in when it was bombarded by searches.
Happens all the time to better sites.

reply to post by d11_m_na_c05

BTW google does not = "the internet" The rest of the net was fine . Just one websites security kicked in when it was bombarded by searches. Happens all the time to better sites.

It was not just Google that crashed, other sites include Twitter, TMZ, AOL's IM, The Los Angeles Times, Perez Hiltons Blog (Don't know who reads it anyway), I could list more...more info here:

edition.cnn.com...

shanemcdonald.org...

well i noticed 4 days till his death...
M.J videos ect... was #1 on google video..
For no apparent reason.

wasn't like he molested another child...
Or had a new record coming out.

So why would all of the sudden 4 days prior to his death till his death would someone flood to watch micheal jackson video's that are 20 and 30 + years old?

4 of 10 video's on google video was micheal jackson's prior to his death..by 4 day's... that is odd folk's.

something still doesn't add up..in the way how did people know to flood google video/youtube and give every m.j video hits to make them #1 on google video?

was someone or a group trying to tell us something for some reason?

reply to post by TheAmused



Wouldn't that be in accordance with the news that he was "coming back"? I mean... with new shows and all?


Peace

Ummm this news makes absolutely no sense and opens a dicussion for conspiracy theories.

I worked for years in a position who would deal with such attacks, and this makes no sense.

Think about it
oh oh, loads of pings(requests from the server) to google server.
I'm positive google IT personnel get alerts, maybe via pager or cell phone.
They check it, find out through the most basic even free web analytics software which such companies use on an hourly basis, and find out it's about michael jackson.

Even it happens at 2am, IT Personnel don't even have to leave the house or even bed(if they have a nearby laptop) to find out the root of the problem. Of course after finding it they will have to go deal with it.

But in the midst of all of this very simple and basic internet admin's 101 ways to find out the problem where do they have time for a press release or a news article?

It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever