Michael Jackson Died in 2007, Says Google



June 27th, 2009 | by Pete Cashmore83 Comments and 525 Reactions</A>






Michael Jackson’s death this week hasn’t shown GoogleGoogle in its best light: not only did Google News fail on Thursday (the system interpreted the flood of searches for “michael jackson” as an attack), but earlier today the search engine was claiming that Michael Jackson died in 2007 – for a time, the message was being appended to the top of searches.
The cause? Michael Jackson did die in 2007 – Michael Jackson the author, that is, not the musician. Google, which often grabs a relevant result from WikipediaWikipedia and places it at the top of the page, clearly grabbed the other Michael for this search term without considering that the most recent death is probably the most relevant.
The attention to the issue likely means it has now been fixed, but it does go to show that Google’s algorithms, while always delivering relevant results for the keywords we enter, don’t always have the intuition to understand exactly what we’re searching for.