If the underlying news (the death of Michael Jackson) wasn't sad, this would be funny. As it is, it's kind of macabre:

Google News was inaccessible for some people Thursday afternoon right as rumors of Jackson's death began to circulate, replaced by an error message reading "We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."

I'm not sure what Google (or any search engine) can do about that. In the first blush of a breaking news story, the volume of identical searches are going to look an awful lot like a denial of service attack.