Newspaper blames Google for airline blunder

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 11 Sep 2008 at 09:12

The Tribune has blamed a problem in Google's crawling technology for the blunder which saw an old story about United Airlines' bankruptcy surfaced as breaking news.

Speaking in a press release, the Tribune says it identified a problem with "Googlebot" technology months ago which prevented it being able to "differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the websites of its newspapers."

"Our records indicate that the Googlebot crawled this story as recently as 2 September and 3 September and apparently treated it as old news."

The Tribune claims it had asked the company to stop using it to crawl for stories on its website, and accused the engine of continuing to "misclassify stories".

The recycled story of United Airlines filing for Chapter 11 bankrupty protection was first reported by the newspaper six years ago, but was regurgitated by Google News on Sunday night, sparking off a chain of events that led to the airline losing 75% of the value of its shares after Bloomberg got wind of the story.

However, Google denied the reports: "The claim that the Tribune Company asked Google to stop crawling its newspaper websites is untrue," a spokesperson says.