

How News of Michael Jackson's Death Traveled Across the Web - jerryji
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-bad-day-for-search-engines-how-news-of-michael-jacksons-death-traveled-across-the-web

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ramchip
_It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go
somewhere other than Google to get the information they want._

I don't think it's a big deal that the autocompletion is not updated in
realtime... someone looking for info on the case will just type "michael
jackson death" and find it anyway. The rest of the article was interesting.

~~~
neilc
Yeah, the real-time web cheerleading at the end of the article was really off-
base.

 _someone looking for info on the case will just type "michael jackson death"
and find it anyway_

Exactly; the real question is how long it took for the news to appear in the
main Google index -- at what point would googling for "michael jackson heart
attach" produce useful results? I would guess very quickly after the TMZ
update.

~~~
jcapote
Not really. When I got texted the rumor, google/yahoo/bing produced nothing
while twitter had 4034 more results to show me within a few seconds of
searching.

~~~
neilc
Sure, when you checked it didn't have anything. The question is how long that
state persisted.

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dunk010
I think that real time data is most definitely very interesting, and an area
ripe for exploitation at the moment. However, I don't feel that in the
majority of cases for people searching on google or any other search engine
that it matters a great deal. Real time search and search in general only
overlap so much. Good article otherwise.

------
diN0bot
the timeline is neat, assuming it is true.

i wish it wasn't framed by the seo part. i'd be interested in a more general
and "trustworthy" (i feel weird saying that.. ?!!?) report.

~~~
DannyDover
(Disclaimer: I wrote this post)

What made you feel it was untrustworthy? I have a huge amount of respect for
the Hacker News community (been reading this site everyday for over a year),
and I would really appreciate the opportunity to be given constructive
criticism.

~~~
diN0bot
Danny, thanks for replying so fast. Makes conversing much easier :-)

I certainly didn't mean to cast negative light on the post. I sent a link to
my friends at work with the text: "Seems like a well intentioned best effort,
but there are surprisingly little links to source or archive material."

I could just be a lazy jerk who doesn't want to get blamed if one piece of
information happens to be wrong. Probably I should have just said "work in
progress", as you did.

I did greatly appreciate the note at the bottom of the post about work-in-
progress and pooling-knowledge. The honest are typically interested in
openness and collaboration.

The reason why I felt like a disclaimer was necessary in my comment and to my
friends was that I personally hadn't verified the claims you had made, and it
wasn't obvious to me that the information was correct. I would expect to see a
note on methodology: were you cycling through refreshes of different web
pages? or noting "last change" dates in webpages? Are there
internetarchive.com (or equivalent) perma-links that should exactly when
stories occured? The wikipedia timeline highlighting is totally obvious (and
easy); I'd simply like to see that kind of thing for more of the "facts".
Where did the information come from. If you state it I'll believe you and feel
pretty confident in the information (would probably verify later if wanted to
publish an academic paper or something, but otherwise good 'nuf for random
intuition :-)

Maybe I'm just paranoid in general when it comes to news.

That said, your timeline really is the bomb. It's super interesting, and I
appreciate the work you did :-)

~~~
DannyDover
Thank you for the honest feedback and no offense taken :-)

I will be sure to make it a priority to include sources and methodology in
future posts. I didn't include these in the first place because I got the
impression that the audience I primarily write for (the community at SEOmoz)
doesn't worry about this as much and would rather get to the "meat" of the
information. If you read the comments on the post, no one even mentions
sources or methodology.

That said, I am always looking for ways to make my posts better and I think
acting on your advice will make my work appear more credible and professional.
Thank you for your time and feedback!

~~~
dc2k08
x17online.com were the first to report he was rushed to UCLA but even they
acknowledge that it was TMZ who broke the story that he was dead.

