The age
September 11, 2008 - 12:41PM
Google's web crawlers have been blamed for reclassifying a six-year-old news story as breaking news and sending the shares of United Airlines (UAL) into a tailspin.
The Tribune Co said in a press release it had identified problems with Google's "Googlebot" technology months ago and asked the company to stop using it to "crawl" for stories on its website.
The Chicago-based publisher said it believes Google continued using the technology to identify stories and make them available as search results on its Google News site, and that Google continues to misclassify stories.
A 2002 Chicago Tribune story about the airline UAL declaring bankruptcy caused the company's stock to lose nearly all of its value after an investment firm posted it on the Bloomberg financial news service on Monday.
UAL shares fell 76 percent to $US3 after the article was posted on the Bloomberg financial news service. The magnitude of the decline may underscore the lack of confidence investors have in UAL and the troubled airline industry in general.
The airline industry has been battered severely by soaring fuel prices that have undone much of the progress airlines made during an industry-wide restructuring.
The story appeared over the weekend on an inner page of the website of Tribune's South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale.
Google News then featured it in its search results, where it was discovered by a staffer at the investment firm Income Securities Advisers.
Richard Lehmann, president of Income Securities Advisors, said the company employs reporters to comb the internet for investment news. The reporters post their findings to Bloomberg, the financial news service.
The staffer on Monday typed the search terms "bankruptcy" and "2008" into the Google search engine, which revealed the Tribune story on the Sun-Sentinel site.
Joe Schwerdt, who runs the Sun-Sentinel's website, told the Chicago Tribune that company records show that no one at the paper had opened the story file since 2003 and that no one outside the paper had access to the file.
A spokesman for Google was not immediately available for comment.
Reuters
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