"At 6:51 a.m. on Tuesday, more than 6,200 queries for "cnn" were conducted on Google. Between 6:26 a.m. and 7:06 a.m., the number of searches for "cnn" averaged approximately 6,000 queries per minute."
People probably wanted to see what was in Google’s cache when they couldn’t load cnn.com. Maybe Google is going to compete with Akamai and Inktomi and bill its caching services eventually.
04/23/04 update: MIT Tech Review: Google and Akamai: Cult of Secrecy vs. Kingdom of Openness.