To get to how this whole thing started we have to back track 2 days to Saturday when Google News indexed a bankruptcy piece published by the Chicago Tribune way back in 2002. United filed for chapter 11 (bankruptcy) that December, but emerged from bankruptcy four years later.Google is insisting that it isn't their fault and that its the South Florida Sun-Sentinel paper republished the story at 10:30pm on Saturday. The paper is insisting that Google Bots must have pulled the piece from the online archive. I tend to believe the paper here as I know that Google's bots can be pretty thorough and if a website was republishing articles at 10:30pm on a Saturday night there would be other older articles resurfacing...
This article that was pulled by the Bots didn't have a time stamp so Google just time stamped it with the current date - September 6, 2008. Not a wise thing to automate!
On Monday morning a reporter within a Florida investment research firm searched for 'bankruptcy 2008' in Google and this six year old story appeared in the results with the new time stamp on it.
Now this firm is one of Bloomberg's third-party content providers and the story was soon displayed onto the Wall Street monitors as nothing more than a headline, which read:
United Airlines files for Ch. 11 to cut costs
On Monday morning when Nasdaq opened the stock price sat at $12.30 but at 11am when the headline appeared the price dropped to $3 within the hour. Eventually UAL trading had to be halted and after the headline was explained the stock price rebounded and ended the day off at $10.92.
Its quite ridiculous how reliant everyone is becoming of Google and what effect it can have when it doesn't operate properly...
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1 comment:
Ah classic!
It's very true, Google will take over the world eventually!
This is just a sign of how Google can make or break anything at any time!
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