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Jeff Goldblum tops the lot

July 3rd, 2009 Filed in: Online Industry 1 comment

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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Last Friday was an extraordinary day. First we awoke to the tragic news that both Farrah Fawcett, of Charlie’s Angels fame, and Michael Jackson had passed away. Then came the rumours, fuelled by Twitter, that Jeff Goldblum had fallen to his death, famously leading to Richard Wilkins announcing on the Today show that this had been confirmed by the New Zealand Police. Fortunately for Jeff, if somewhat unfortunately for Richard, the rumours were false and this was just the latest in the line of celebrity hoax death reports.

However, in Search we noticed something unusual. Sure Michael Jackson was big news, and we were seeing big spikes in traffic, but Jeff Goldblum searches were proving way more popular. In fact, on Friday June 26th, there were over three times as many searches on Jeff Goldblum as on Michael Jackson. So how could this be?

By 8am Michael Jackson was pretty much blanket coverage across all online major news sources but things were strangely quiet around Jeff Goldblum on the major news sites. With the advent of Twitter rumours of this nature have the ability to spread rapidly. Traditional news sources, rightly, need to check their facts before publication; but this leaves a period of time where there is effectively an information void.

As the public looked to answer the question “Is Jeff Goldblum dead?” they turned to Search for the answer. After all, who doesn’t love the thrill of being amongst the first to find out the true story?

Have a great weekend everyone.

Tony Kinner
Search Product Manager, Yahoo!7

Tags: Farrah Fawcett, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Jackson, Richard Wilkins, Search, Tony Kinner, Twitter