According
to the article, The
Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine, by Richard
Wiggins, on September 11th, the terrorist attacks not only changed the skies of
the United States, they also changed how leading search engines operate. On this day, millions of people wanted
to urgently seek information on the attacks. When something drastic
happens in our world, people tend to seek out different sources of news. Some people watch television, others
listen to the radio, and others open a web browser and go to an online
newspaper site. Still some others
will go to a search engine or portal.
On
September 11th, traffic to search engines and portals was up by ten
times more than normal. This
increased traffic to search
engines was due to inaccessible online news sites. It took time for search engines
to adjust, but analysts said they eventually came up to speed. Across the web,
the majority of searches were related to the attack. The word "news"
was the most requested word across the web on the day of the attack. According
to Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, the best performing search
engine was Alta Vista brought up news on the attack in less than two hours
after the attacks. The main reason that some search engines had no news
was because many major search engines are based out on the West Coast of the
United States.
Wiggins
uses Google as an example of a search engine that changed its presentation
after the September 11th attacks. Before the September 11th attacks,
Google had a simple home page. Once the attack occurred a lot of users turned
to Google for information.
On
September 11th Google did not offer a specialized index of current news
sources. Days after the attacks Google adapted its content to fit the public's
needs. With new changes evolving as the days went by after the attacks, Google
was becoming more and more like a portal. Google was
updating their content as it changed to fit the public's needs.
Tabs
now appear on Google allowing users to switch among basic web searches, image
searches, and Google groups. After performing a search, one can click on one of
the other tabs to re-execute the same search in one of Google's other indexes.
Wiggins also guesses that Google will retain a breaking news component on their
site. Although the web and Internet are a lot more capable of handling more
visitors than they were almost a decade ago, they are still affected when their
audience starts to shoot up drastically.