This is the story of how human and machine errors, along with Google and the Chicago Tribune, sent the stock of UAL (United Airlines' parent company) hurtling down Wall Street's chasm. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan and IDC's Susan Feldman weigh in on as Google and the Tribune seek to move past the unfortunate, untimely 6-year-old bankruptcy report.

A 2002 Chicago Tribune story on UAL Corp.'s bankruptcy filing popped up on Google News on Monday, sending shares in the parent company of United Airlines to $3 from $12.50 on the Nasdaq. The stock rallied Tuesday (thank heaven) and now sits at $10.50.

The Tribune outlined the happening in a press release. Google outlined it in a blog post here.

Google said its search bot, which crawls pages online and catalogs content, Sept. 6 discovered a new link on the Web site of Tribune's South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper in a section called "Popular Stories: Business."

The link did NOT, and this is key, include a dateline, but the Sun-Sentinel page had a fresh date above the article on the top of the page of "September 7, 2008" (Eastern).

Read the rest of this article on eWEEK.com.

 

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