Michael Jackson in Google Trends

Love or loathe, the man or his music. Michael Jackson’s death has produced an awesome display of Google searches.

As the search engine you’ve probably already heard on the media about the massive volume of hits that fooled Google into thinking it was under attack and slowed Google down.

Web Consultant’s Eye

As a web consultant it is interesting to me, okay okay – I love the web, that Google Trends is already showing the following:-

  • A mark on the timeline referencing news of Michael Jackson’s death. Nice automation Google.
  • If you compare the level of searches over the last 12 months to the time of his death you can see a 30 fold jump in traffic (opens in new window)
  • And if you change the scale to just the last 30 days you find two things… first that whilst the number of actual user searches is falling the number of news articles about him are beginning to increase after the obvious surge. NB. This blog post will add to that too.
  • Second thing we notice from the 30 days scale is that the “surge” of web traffic over the “normal” level indicates that the factor is only 10 fold…. a bit of simple maths tells me that the traffic before he died was therefore three times higher than over the last 12 months…. which is a great increase for someone trying to make a comeback

your Web Consultant

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