Browsing twitter I noticed that their Top Trending topic as of 5PM AEST today was Rick Astley. Why would Rick Astley suddenly become such a hot topic on twitter, surely Never Gonna Give You Up hadn’t made it back into the Top 100?

I hit Google and searched on his name. The snippet returned in the search results read:

Richard Paul “Rick” Astley (born 6 February 1966, Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire) was an English singer-songwriter and musician. Astley was married to…

WAS an English singer-songwriter. WAS married to. Surely if Google had indexed the page then it must have been around for quite a while on Wikipedia and must therefore be true?

I clicked through to the Wikipedia page to find that there was no mention of his death, nor any mention of a return to the Top 100 either. The uncited update of his death in Germany clearly didn’t sit well amongst Wiki moderators and proved to be yet another celebrity death hoax, one of a number to come into fruition since Michael Jackson’s death just 4 days ago.

A couple of things that struck me about this rumour, as I am sure happened with previous such hoaxes as well as the real stories of celebrities passing, was the sheer virality of it (top trending topic on twitter within a short period of time) and most of all how quickly, unless it was just coincidence, Google indexed the Wiki page.

Was the quick visit from a Google indexing bot down to Google monitoring page interest in real time, or as a result of some collaboration with twitter where by trending topics are shared directly with Google on a frequent basis, prompting them to prioritise indexing of related pages? Sounds like the stuff of SEO dreams whatever the case if you ask me.

UPDATE: An hour on and a Rick Astley search now returns yet another updated Google snippet, this time reading:

Richard Paul “Rick” Astley (born 6 February 1966, Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire) is an English singer-songwriter and musician. Astley is married to producer…

Google really does love Wikipedia. Or Rick Astley.