Brittany Murphy Death & Google’s Real Time Search Results

Personally I think that the real time results are horrible. I haven't seen anything in them of value, and it has mostly been useless drivel.

It's making me really not like searching on google. They need to let me turn this off, or they're going to lose a lot of branch loyalty by having useless results on the top of their search pages.

From MTV.com: "Brittany Murphy... died at 10:04 a.m. PT" (= 1:04pm ET)

Byline of the OP: "Dec 20, 2009 at 3:53pm ET by Danny Sullivan" (less than three hours later)

He then updates his post in response to (well deserved) criticism:

"First, this post wasn’t rushed out. It took me about an hour to compile."

So assuming he heard about it the instant it happened, he started writing the post TWO HOURS after she passed away.

Then he writes: "Murphy’s death is a tragedy. She was a popular actress, and I was as saddened as anyone to hear about it. My reaction, as I suspect for many, was “Oh, no” and disbelief."

Color me unconvinced.

A very thoughtful breakdown. It is obvious that Danny spent a good deal of time searching and watching the realtime results.

I also had to love Danny's response to the commentors who accused him of using Brittany Murphy's death to get traffic.

I think Google’s target market for this service might consist of people who would be willing pay a newspaper company to read this kind of information hours later on the newspapers website. Seems Google might be trying to slay the dragon in their own unique techy way.

This might catch on with a certain target demographic. I wonder if this thing will iterate.

I thought Chris Henry's fatal accident was the first test, but anyway...