Wednesday, 04, May 2011 02:07
Searches for the term 'bin laden' increased by one million per cent in the hour following the announcement of Osama bin Laden's death, Google has revealed.
The 10,000-fold spike in search queries began at 20:30 Pacific Daylight Savings Time, according to a graph shared by Google on its Twitpic account.
In the UK, that corresponds to 04:30 BST on May 2nd, roughly 45 minutes after bin Laden's death first hit Twitter via news outlets like CNN.
"On May 1st between 7:30-8:30 pm PST, we saw a 1 million percent increase in searches for [bin laden]," the search engine company tweeted from its @google account.
Search activity fell off rapidly following the initial surge, but gained ground once again after midnight local time.
According to the tweeted Google graph, the second peak occurred early on May 2nd - before 06:00 local time - with traffic trailing off steadily over the remainder of the day.
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