'Compete, a Web analytics firm based in Boston, crunched some numbers and came up with a few data points to help illustrate the surge.

'It found that there were 9.98 million queries for the terms “Michael” and “Jackson” across the top 25 search engines and news and social media sites in the week ended June 27. Compete said that was more than 24 times the number of queries for information using the terms “Iran” and “election” during the week before.'