Webware

The death of Michael Jackson in June launched a frenzy of Web activity and propelled the late pop star to the top of the search charts for 2009.

That's the word from Google, Yahoo, and Bing, all of which have revealed their popular search terms for the past year.

It's not too shocking to see Jackson leading the searches for the year. Following the pop star's death in June, Akamai found that worldwide Web traffic had surged 11 percent over normal levels. Even Google--which in the initial going thought the Jackson-related traffic was an attack of some sort--was briefly sent staggering.

Searches for Michael Jackson songs spiked in late June when news broke about the pop star's death.

(Credit: Google)

According to Google's Zeitgeist findings, "Michael Jackson" was the "fastest rising" worldwide search term of 2009. In the U.S., "Michael Jackson" placed second behind "Twitter." Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, in a blog post also pointed to an up-and-coming music sensation:

As millions of fans said goodbye to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson led the list of our top 10 fastest rising queries across the globe. And a new star was born, too--quirky pop singer Lady Gaga became a search sensation the world over. In addition to appearing on many regional fastest-rising search term lists, from the Czech Republic to Switzerland and Kenya to the United Kingdom, Lady Gaga also landed in the #9 spot on the global fastest rising list.

On the social side, Google monitored whose Twitter accounts were the most searched for. According to the company, Miley Cyrus' Twitter account was the most sought after, followed by those of Lance Armstrong and Taylor Swift. Khloe Kardashian's marriage to basketball player Lamar Odom was the most-Googled wedding of the year.

"Michael Jackson" was the top Yahoo search term for the year. He was followed by a who's who (and a what's what) of the U.S. entertainment scene. "Twilight" was the second most-popular search term, followed by wrestling organization "WWE," starlet "Megan Fox," singer "Britney Spears," and manga series "Naruto." Filling out the top 10 were "American Idol," "Kim Kardashian," "Nascar," and "Runescape."

Microsoft's Bing, which debuted in late May, had similar results. Once again, "Michael Jackson" was the top "trending topic," followed by "Twitter" and "swine flu." "Stock market" and "Farrah Fawcett" rounded out Bing's top five.

Of course, 2009 was also marked by continued concern over the state of the economy. According to Yahoo, "coupons," "unemployment," and "stimulus plan" were the most-numerous queries related to the economy. By contrast, Google's most-searched economy-related terms were "crisis," "cash for clunkers," and "Iceland."

Google also followed queries related to celebrity deaths in 2009. Users searched for "Michael Jackson" the most, followed by "Billy Mays" and "Steve McNair." Yahoo's data revealed that Michael Jackson's death was the most-searched term, but unlike Google's data, the pop star was followed by "Farrah Fawcett" and "Patrick Swayze."

See also:
• Google Zeitgeist 2009
• Yahoo Year in Review 2009
• Top Bing searches in 2009

Michael Jackson's memorial ceremony might be over, but that doesn't mean you have to forget the star. If you're a big fan of the King of Pop, you can join others on Facebook who have created groups to remember him.

Remembering Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson -- If you're trying to find answers to the singer's death, the Michael Jackson group is the place to be. Although it has just over 3,000 members, they're all trying to determine the events surrounding his death. In fact, the group's description starts out with a discussion on his doctors.

If you're looking for something other than that, the group also offers some pictures and videos of Jackson performing. It's not the most active group, it might be worth checking out.

The Michael Jackson group is trying to figure out why the pop star died.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

MICHAEL JACKSON -- The MICHAEL JACKSON group offers all kinds of content from the pop star. The group provides over 1,000 pictures of Jackson, as well as dozens of videos taken from YouTube. Some of those videos play his songs, while others show him battling media hordes whenever he made a public appearance.

Because the group has over 80,000 members, the group's discussion pages are extremely active. Much of the recent discussion has been on the events surrounding his death, but you'll also find heated debates over many facets of Jackson's life. It's a great place to share your opinions of the pop star.

You'll find a great discussion forum at the MICHAEL JACKSON group.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Weeks ago, the news of Michael Jackson's passing brought major news sites to their knees, so Tuesday's memorial service for the singer was expected to bring similar results.

This time it appears sites were better prepared for the traffic onslaught.

According to Gomez Incorporated, a company that monitors Web usage quality, there were both slowdowns and outages, including one that dramatically slowed Twitter's performance. The company analyzed performance on seven news sites from multiple locations during Tuesday's event, with some of the biggest slowdowns coming to streaming video. Asia experienced a 40 percent increase in what the company calls "stalling issues," with the U.S. experiencing an increase of around 5 percent.

One of those news outlets that was serving up live streaming video was CNN, which according to internal data, topped out at 781,000 concurrent streams of the event. Between midnight EDT and 4 p.m. the site also pulled in 11 million unique users who turned 72 million pages.

Ustream, which provided live streaming in a partnership with CBS, says the event was the "largest ever" that had been hosted on the service, in part because it was a worldwide broadcast. The service had 4.6 million streams of the memorial going, made up from 1.6 million unique users. It also had more than 12,000 messages posted every minute to its built-in user chat rooms. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

Besides slowdowns in streaming video, news sites also had lower availability, which means some users were unable to access them. Gomez recorded that number as low as 98.2 percent, whereas the sites usually maintain uptime in excess of 99.65 percent. Response times also took a hit. News sites experienced double, and nearly triple the load time to serve up pages. In the case of Twitter, many users were unable to view or post messages to the service. At what was seemingly the peak of Twitter's load, Gomez benchmarked it as taking around 62 seconds for the site's home page to load, then allow users to log in--a process that normally takes just a few seconds.

Update: See also Larry Dignan's analysis over at ZDNet. He points to data host Akamai's visualization tool, which shows real-time activity on its sites which represent around 20 percent of the Web's traffic. There's a noticeable bump around the time the memorial service begins.

Internet Web traffic hit its peak right around the beginning of the service, according to Akamai.

(Credit: CNET / Akamai)

CNET News' Greg Sandoval contributed to this report.

One of the biggest news stories in years caught Microsoft's Bing a little off guard.

The flood of traffic on the Internet following reports that Michael Jackson had been rushed to a Los Angeles hospital last Thursday, where he later died, has been well documented: Google at first thought the surge was an attack on its servers. Microsoft released statistics Thursday indicating it, too, witnessed a surge in traffic related to Jackson, but admitted that Bing News could have done a much better job delivering relevant stories during the two or so frantic hours in which searches went through the roof.

"By most reports, Bing did not deliver the best experience for our customers soon after TMZ posted the news on their blog," wrote Jacquelyn Krones, senior product planner for Bing News. "As Search Engine Journal pointed out, we had the story but it was hidden at the bottom of the main page and even deeper in our xRank result." Bing's xRank is supposed to track the most popular people surfacing on the Internet on a given day: Karl Malden currently ranks highest in xRank.

Microsoft has a switch it calls "news go big" that it can throw in the event of a huge breaking news story like Jackson's death. Usually, images are the first thing Bing searchers see when searching for a celebrity such as Jackson, but Microsoft can change the placement of those results in the rare event of a breaking news story that generates "unusual activity."

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.

Michael Jackson-related searches took off following reports that he had been rushed to the hospital last week.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Searches for Michael Jackson surged a little before 3 p.m. PDT Thursday.

(Credit: Google)

Google has confirmed that the surge of Michael Jackson-related searches on Google News Thursday was first interpreted as an attack on its service.

Google News was inaccessible for some people Thursday afternoon right as rumors of Jackson's death began to circulate, replaced by an error message reading "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."

Of course, those queries were quite legitimate, as millions around the world searched for accurate information regarding Jackson following reports that he had suffered cardiac arrest. The spike in queries began at about 2:45 p.m. PDT Thursday, and Google thought the traffic was an attack for about 25 minutes before realizing what was going on.

Google also noted that it saw a huge spike in mobile searches. Yahoo's data backed up Google's; it set a record for unique visitors in a single day with 16.4 million visitors, and its lead story on Jackson's death was the most highly-visited story in its history.

As news organizations reported Michael Jackson's hospitalization on Thursday afternoon, Wikipedia editors were wrestling with the problem of whether to allow an unverified report of the singer's death to appear on the online encyclopedia.

Michael Jackson, age 13, poses in his home in Encino, Calif., in 1972. He earned his first No. 1 solo record that year with "Ben."

(Credit: CBS)

The entertainment site TMZ.com reported at 2:20 p.m. PDT that: "We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back."

Some Wikipedians repeatedly deleted references to Jackson's alleged demise, saying in separate comments that "This is not yet verified," "He's not dead," "Premature edits," and "ONCE AGAIN, HE IS NOT DEAD, JUST STOP."

But they were too slow for the legions of Wikipedia users who descended on the site and repeatedly modified the entry about the pop star. The typical edit was to insert Thursday as the date of Jackson's demise. Others were more subtle; one used the word "was" instead of "is," while another edit called "Invincible" his "last studio album."

By around 3:15 p.m. PDT, Wikipedia appeared to be temporarily overloaded. The site reported the error: "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties... Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.24))"

Plenty of blogs echoed TMZ's report, but news organizations tended to be more cautious. Fox News said Jackson's "condition wasn't immediately clear," while Reuters cited TMZ.

The Los Angeles Times initially reported that Jackson was in a coma, and then updated its story at 3:15 p.m. PDT to say: "Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times." (The Times' Web server was overloaded and could only be reached intermittently.)

Around the same time, the Wikipedia editors had finally intervened in the edit-and-delete-the-edits scrum. One locked two articles about Jackson and his health for about six hours, which prevented them from being modified until the situation became more clear.

Apple has made it pretty obvious they are fans of the Beatles.

(Credit: MP3.com)

Major record label EMI announced today that they have settled an ongoing copyright dispute with the Beatles that had prevented the label from licensing their music for distribution. In light of EMI's recent deal to release its catalog on iTunes, it appears that there is little left to prevent the Fab Four's back catalog from finally being released online.

Legal issues aside, the band has historically declined offers to sell downloads of its music. Still, with Steve Jobs using the Beatles' music as part of his Macworld demonstration for the iPhone, it's fair to say Apple is eager negotiate a way to make iTunes the first download music service to offer the group's music. If Michael Jackson hasn't sold his remaining shares of Beatles publishing rights to pay for his legal troubles, I'm sure he and his pet chimpanzee are crossing their fingers hoping this deal goes through.