In the post-Super Bowl MTV halftime show hoopla that (if you may be a mountain hermit and haven’t yet heard) involved Justin Timberlake ripping off Janet Jackson’s clothes to expose her breast on national television- we’ve seen it all. Non-stop TV news, Entertainment Tonight, Michael Powell and the FCC looking into the case, CBS dissing MTV, and President George W. Bush dozing off during the halftime show. But now, the search engine industry is seeing the rippling effects of the Janet Jackson northern exposure- and not on Booble!
Janet Jackson’s spectacularly bad publicity has become the most-searched for event in the history of web search! Lycos, Google, and Yahoo have all reported their #1 searches for the week as being for “Janet Jackson.” Yahoo’s top search terms in this weeks Yahoo Buzz are as follows: Janet Jackson, Superbowl, Justin Timberlake and at #4 the Drudge Report (the sole political motivated term in the week of Democratic Primaries).
Aaron Schatz of the Lycos Top 50 writes
“Janet Jackson exposing her breast during the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday night has proved to be the most-searched event in the history of the Internet.
On Monday, Janet Jackson and the halftime show received 60 times as many searches as the Paris Hilton sex tape and 80 times as many searches as Britney Spears. Jackson was searched 50 times for every request for the topic that normally dominates on the day after the game, Super Bowl commercials. She also received 275 times as many searches as the streaker who ran on the field before the second half, and 350 times as many searches as Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady.
Janet Jackson wasn’t the only person involved in the stunt, of course. Justin Timberlake received 40 times as many searches as he does on a normal day.”
Such a huge amount of searches, stress on site servers and traffic to a site can be worse than having the MyDoom “Deny of Service” Virus directed at your site. The #2 Google result for “Janet Jackson” reads as:
miss-janet.com temporarily down
miss-janet.com temporarily down. After Janet’s perfomance on the Superbowl
we got an unexpected high amount of visits on our website. …
Description: Includes news, chat, links, games, and webcards.
Category: Arts > Music > Bands and Artists > J > Jackson, Janet
www.miss-janet.com/ – 2k – 3 Feb 2004 – Cached – Similar pages
The #3 Google result is for AskMen, a men’s news magazine (stuffed to the gut with online advertisements) like the online version of Maxim. Guess they’re rolling around like pigs in mud over this.
Is Janet Jackson planning to become the diva of online downloads? Is there a method to this madness? Why didn’t Howard Dean think of exposing his breasts in his Iowa speech?
There may be some more developments that come after this whole Janet Jackson search caper. The Search Engine Journal will keep our readers informed.
