Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Full story here
[news.bbc.co.uk...]
But the biggest lesson was that it is difficult to overstate the response to sudden, unexpected death of a known personality.
We would see huge spikes on people who you only knew their name. If this follows form, the numbers will spike the return to normal quickly. Of course, we have all of this wonderfully entertaining video to show, so this it's likely NOT to follow form.
This is not about Michael Jackson some much is that it is about death. (BTW: Death out-performs pretty women by far. And there really isn't any one thing after death and pretty women that ranks.)
As much as i would love to discuss the fear of death and sex on the human psyche (not being sarcastic here - it's a great topic)...
This is a huge epic fail on Google part's.
When I say "epic fail", i'm not using hyperbole either.
What an embarrassment on Goog's part!
The ONE international news story that everyone in the world would be looking for and Goog's adversarial "anti-SEO, anti-spammer" philosophy comes to bite them in the a$$ big time.
Geez, Goog, wonder how much market share you lost to Bing permanently while your B.S. SE was serving up error messages?
Epic Fail! Beyond reasoning.
Something like this should once again be a wake up call that Goog is and has had a very warped worldview of what the the internet is for.
I'm sure Google is often under attack (what bragging rights a hacker might get, eh?) and needs a lot of automated systems for protection. I doubt that the sites I work with could recover as fast.
Amazon top 15 music sales? Michael Jackson!
Just wish I could spin the story somehow to fit into my website ;-)
It took Google News 35 minutes to analyze the situation and realize that it was caused by big news rather than an actual attack
lol, oh you mean AFTER they saw the REAL NEWS sources
(you really want to start this convo with me again?)
What's wrong with that situation?!
Epic fail.
Period.
No need to spin "how much better Goog did than"....? Who exactly?
the other SEs who make billions of dollars a year and have 60% marketshare?!
They are the almighty Goog. (ahem "NEWS?!" wat a joke)
Stop treating them like the '98 college project.
It's a joke.
No, in fact, its an alright LIE to call their service Google News.
What more evidence do you need that this?
God forbid it's "attack on XY country" and "Google News" is busy ensuring the 20 people looking for "quantum physics" find those sites, while millions of others are getting B.S. errors.
Figure it out Goog.
Do better Goog.
Nuff Said
Huge EPIC Fail!
How so?
With the proliferation of massive botnets that can herd up to 250K+ PCs simultaneously it's not surprising that Google's software may have initially detected such an influx of the same terms as an attack or a test of their defenses.
There was an appropriate captcha at the bottom of the page, fill in the answer and you get the results.
Good for Google, at least we know they are bracing for attack and can keep their services running when something attempts to strain their services beyond capacity.
God bless that in the event there is an "attack on XY country" we're only a captcha away from what we need to know and that Google is still up and running. Truth is the news will break first on twitter and the Fail Whale will be dominating millions of browsers in mere seconds.
They figured it out.
Not Bad Goog
Nuff Said
[edited by: incrediBILL at 10:18 pm (utc) on June 26, 2009]
yet
on the other hand, are unable to fulfill the basic requirement of serving up RESULTS for users on the other hand.
So whenever there's a REAL news story that affects more than what?
100,000 people?
500,000 people?
1,000,000 people?
at the same time in more than one country, then we just give Goog a pass at working properly?!
Good to know.
I'll be looking for the disclaimer that states:
"Any real news that might affect more than 25,000 people at one time will not be shown as we can't figure out whats real or a spam bot.
Please visit Bing.com, Yahoo.com or CNN.com for any real updates that are only affecting less than 25,000. Thank you for your patience"
HOWEVER if it's a 2 year old news story about a Fortune 500 company and could seriously affect their stock and the stock market as a whole, we'll be sure to consider it "up to date, hot breaking news" and blast it all over Google Alerts as fresh off the press.
Got it.
Thanks for letting me know what a joke they are when it comes to these types of situation.
Botnets? Please. Some low-level organized crime types have Google so scared they can't figure out automation from reality?
Again, tell me how smart they are over there..
Spend some of that money and make a better product.
[edited by: tedster at 10:56 pm (utc) on June 26, 2009]
Botnets? Please. Some low-level organized crime types have Google so scared they can't figure out automation from reality?
I deal with botnets every day, it's a huge problem, don't be dismissive because they can take down major hosts in mere minutes.
What we're dealing with here is a sudden influx, a grade of service damaging issue.
This is the same type of situation that causes telephones to generate fast busy signals after a major earthquake when everyone attempts to make a call all at once.
The difference is Google appears it can protect itself from a sudden overload unlike the phone company.
FWIW, I used to run a hosting company and when you had an unmetered overload of your service, it was party over, everyone on the pipeline was offline.
Google did stunningly well IMO.
Unless you can't see that Google literally survived what couldn't easily be deemed a surfing tsunami level event, then you're only interested in bashing Google without taking into consideration their rapid response to a quickly alarming situation.
The internet isn't like broadcast television, you don't get a failure to connect if 25 million people turn on ABC simultaneously.
As a matter of fact, I'm actually surprised some of the broadband internet services didn't collapse under the sudden influx.
I'm impressed they all stayed up and running because they beat the negative press about the lack of available excess bandwidth.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 11:00 pm (utc) on June 26, 2009]
[seomoz.org...]
It's not a suprise to me that Google News fell behind in "real time" search results. It's not something that they historically considered their core mission, although Twitter may have forced a change in that idea for them.
A couple months ago there were some discussions between Twitter and Google that focused on "real time" search, and ever since then I've been waiting to see some new service from Google in the real-time "micro-blogging" area. I just hope it doesn't get folded into Universal Search results ;(
"North Korea Launches Nuclear Missles at U.S. targets"
'G' will probably figure it's about themselves.
the most embarrassing failure is that it took almost 1.5 hours AFTER news was online for it to appear in the News Search results.
Exactly.
Google indexes new content off my blog in 30 minutes or less so how could a major news story still not be indexed for 90 minutes?
That's a huge embarrassing fail.
At least they survived "the attack" to eventually get it indexed, LOL!
Anyone that looks to Google for major news like a nuclear missile attack will be a pile of radioactive ashes long before they ever find what they were looking for in Google.
Anyone that looks to Google for major news like a nuclear missile attack will be a pile of radioactive ashes long before they ever find what they were looking for in Google.
-.- I'm assuming you're not from the States.
Twitter's service was also stumbling for a while (intermittently unavailable) as well as the TMZ servers at AOL where the original story broke. The TMZ server troubles must have made things difficult for all the search services to spider the story and get it listed.
If it HAD been a real attack Google is ready. As it stands there was a short delay while they verified facts. A+
Tedster, lots of things made spidering difficult, not least of which was the sudden massive jump in links being dumped online with various similar anchor text. Opportunistic people spammed jibberish all day long to capitalize on him but quickly took down their pages with permanent redirects.
It turned into pure backlink producing mayhem for a bit, so much focused traffic...
Google made up for its failure by quickly adding new suggested searches:
michael jackson death michael jackson dying
(Since been replaced.) But now
michael jackson's funeral
is higher than michael jackson (as you type in michael)
p/g
It seems Microsoft (and others) finally noticed that Bing had failed also. (Fortunately, it didn't matter.)
<enter gnomic mode>
Failure is not mere lack of success. Failure is obliviousness in the face of lack of success.
Failure is not mere lack of success. Failure is obliviousness in the face of lack of success.
This is all i wanted to hear from the market leader
instead of arrogant excuses
Yet we hear it from Bing. (telling, isn't it?)
Apparently, the company feels it could have done that more quickly in the minutes following TMZ's report. "...In the case of breaking news such as this, we will focus on ensuring that the whole experience quickly accommodates the surge in customers' interest," Krones wrote.
.
<"Much learning, young Padawan Goog, still needs" remarked Yoda on the subject.>
