Within days after the story broke, Viswanathan's name became one of the most searched terms at the blog search engine Technorati, and the scandal was a popular topic for commentators at web forums from MetaFilter to Amazon.com and Gawker.com. On May 1, 2006, The New York Times ran a story giving national prominence to claims on the Sepia Mutiny blog that Viswanathan may have lifted text from Salman Rushdie's 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
