Tribune: Google bot error caused airline stock collapse

The owner of the Chicago Tribune claims that Google is to blame for the collapse of United Airlines stock price when an old story about the airline's bankruptcy was published online. Google and the Tribune Company are pointing fingers over this, but true cause here is as old as humankind: greed.

First some background. An article originally published on December 10, 2002, by the Chicago Tribune about United's plan to seek bankruptcy protection was accidentally recirculated a few days ago by Income Securities Advisors to a Bloomberg stock market information site. When investors saw the article, they believed it was current news, and the sell-off began. The price fell from $12 to $3, and trading in United was halted. Eventually the truth came out, and the price rebounded.

What actually happened is too convoluted a tale to explain in detail. The Tribune Company says the fault starts with Google. The Tribune Company says that a Google bot picked up the old story on the Web site of the South Florida Sun Sentinel (also owned by the Tribune Company) that because Google picked it up, traffic flowed to the story, and it was eventually distributed by Income Securities Advisors to Bloomberg.

The Tribune Company also claims that it had previously asked Google not to crawl its site, and that Google refused.

Google disputes the claims, of course.

So who's at fault here? The Tribune Company, Google, and every other Web site that uses automation rather than human intelligence for determining what is news. The old story showed up as a top link in the South Florida Sun Sentinel because the story was clicked on once during a late hour when there was little traffic to the site. That made it a "top story," and so it was automatically put near the top of the page. The Google bot saw it, and assumed it was a new story. Things spiralled out of control from there.

What does greed have to do with all this? It's cheaper to automate something than to pay a human being to do it. In many instances, automation is fine. But when it comes to making value judgements --- something as simple as is this news story old or new? --- automation doesn't work. But it's cheaper than labor, and so increasingly people are being replaced by bots.

When that happens, incidents like the United Airlines fiasco are inevitable.

Like this blog? Subscribe to the RSS feed!