The death of Michael Jackson didn’t just affect the wired Internet last week. Google reports that the event triggered one of the largest mobile search spikes it has ever seen, with five of the top 20 searches about the pop icon.
Search volume started to increase around 2 p.m. Pacific on June 25, skyrocketed by 3 p.m. and stabilized about 8 p.m., according to a Google blog. Google initially mistook the spike as an automated attack. For about 25 minutes on Thursday, when people searched Google News, they saw a “We’re sorry” page before finding the articles they were looking for, according to a post by R.J. Pittman, director of product management
While Twitter crashed, CNN quoted AOL consumer adviser Regina Lewis saying the day should prove a historic milestone for mobile Internet traffic. That could have been because people were checking news headlines from work but didn’t want to use their desktop computers to search for content unrelated to work.