The number of searches for Michael Jackson via search engines was extremely high on the 25th and 26th of June. To give you an idea, there were more searches for Michael Jackson than for the usually highly searched terms ‘sex’, ‘mp3’, ‘Yahoo’ and ‘Google’ cumulated.

Michael Jackson - Google Trends

Obviously the passing away of the ‘King of Pop’ was an international event and people were looking for information online worldwide. The number of searches was so high that Google thought during the first hours that it was cyber attack from some hackers. Some people were even sent to a ‘Sorry’ page when they were looking for Michael Jackson related keywords on Google.

 
Yahoo! had the good idea of publishing on its home page an article about Michael Jackson presumed death and the article brought five times more traffic than usual. Yahoo! communicates that they had 800,000 clicks in one minutes. It is the most viewed Yahoo! article ever.

 
Twitter was also very slow because the number of users trying to post message regarding Michael Jackson. Unsurprisingly, Michael Jackson has been the number one topic since the 25th of June.

 
Michael Jackson’s untimely death was pretty much the first global event fully amplified by social media and search engines.