June 29, 2009 by Matt Thomas
According to a press release form Google, the surge in Michael Jackson related searches on Thursday, as news about the singer’s death first began to circulate, was originally interpreted as an attack on Google News. People who typed ‘Michael Jackson’ or anything related into Google News were confronted with this message, “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.”
In Google’s defence, it only took about 25 minutes for them to realise their mistake and resume normal service. Though it does raise questions when what is supposed to be a news service fails to deliver information about the biggest showbiz story of the century so far, it’s hard to see what else they could have done. These were, after all, highly unusual circumstances.
Even with the confusion, Thursday still saw a huge spike in views for the Google news site. In fact, thanks to Michael Jackson, the site set a record for unique visitors grabbing a huge 16.4 million visits and making their lead story on the subject the most highly visited article in history.
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