https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/nyregion/obituary-pirates-matteo-sachman.html
In the hours after his death, friends and family scrambled to find out more about Mr. Sachman’s death. Few details were available — no obituary, no news stories.
But as people searched Google for information, someone on the other side of the world was searching for exactly the kinds of reverberations that Mr. Sachman’s death had caused.
Faisal Shah Khan, an internet marketer in India, knew nothing about Mr. Sachman. But suddenly, enough people were searching for “Matteo Sachman” to push his name up a list of trending Google search topics that Mr. Khan was monitoring as part of a digital moneymaking scheme.
To Mr. Khan, the rising interest meant that an audience for online content that did not yet exist was growing rapidly before his eyes. He was poised to deliver it.
Mr. Khan, 30, is part of a booming cottage industry online, in which enterprising people take advantage of the void of information in the wake of a sudden tragedy to drive web traffic to hastily assembled articles and YouTube videos.