The much-circulated story about United Airlines parent corporation and an old Tribune news story brings up the problem of extinguishing or at least properly archiving old Web content.
This is what happened: A previously-published article about UAL’s 2002 bankruptcy filing was showing up on Google’s News Service. That’s the page you see when you click on Google News. Articles sometimes shows up on sites that use Google News for content. The story appeared as if it was a current news article. As this piece of “news” moved through the global Web sphere UAL’s stock dove on Monday from $12.50 to below $4 a share. It crept back up to $10.60 by Tuesday as word of the “new old news” was propagated to the Web, but that was still about 13% off its Monday opening price.
So how did this happen? I’m sure Google and others are trying to track it down. Did the article get refreshed in some way? Perhaps a new creation date from moving files to a new server? Or another Web site updating old news links made it appear to be new? The Google indexer may have refreshed it and all it takes is a couple hits to get things going, especially with news articles.
Having an article’s date somewhere in the title, subtitle or metadata would have helped. Google’s crawler would have skipped it. I use Google Alerts and often I’ll get alerted about an article that appeared months ago.
It will be interesting to see the story behind this fiasco as the forensics are brought out. Stay tuned.
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Tags: bankruptcy • Google • indexer • plunge • search engine optimization • stock • Tribune • UAL • United Airlines
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October 29th, 2008 at 10:57 am
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