

Bad "most popular" algorithm led to United Airline's stock collapsing. - jakewolf
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122109238502221651.html?mod=hps_us_my_companies

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brandnewlow
"Tribune said it asked Google to stop using Google to crawl newspaper Web
sites but Google continued to do so."

Wait, really? I find this disingenuous to say the least, coming from the same
Tribune company that created a skunkworks project six months ago explicitly
tasked with co-opting and "gaming" online communities of note (Digg, twitter,
flickr and others.) They're desperate for pageviews. How many readers would
they lose if the Googlebot actually kept out?

And can't they just block it out with a robot.txt file?

~~~
theantidote
Maybe they did ask and Google didn't respond because they figured any idiot
knows about the robot.txt file. Of course they weren't expecting the idiocy of
the Tribune's web admin.

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extension
So, the Tribune put an _undated_ story on their front page under "top stories"
and blames Google for not figuring out that the story was old? How would a
human even realize that, let alone a bot?

If accounts of the story are accurate then the _only_ party that screwed up
was the Tribune by a) using an absurdly naive "top story" algorithm and b) not
dating their stories (pathetic for any site in this age, but a _newspaper_!?)

~~~
extension
Here's the Sun-Sentinel approved story: [http://www.sun-
sentinel.com/business/sfl-flzunited0909sbsep0...](http://www.sun-
sentinel.com/business/sfl-flzunited0909sbsep09,0,7405794.story)

Apparently, we're supposed to guess article dates by reading the copy or look
at the dates on the comments. Nonetheless, they appear to be dating all of
their stories now.

------
mhartl
It's incredible that this story had such a dramatic effect on UAL. This
suggests a strategy:

    
    
      1. Plant bad stories about large companies.
      2. Buy put options and wait.
      3. Profit!

~~~
dfranke
This is nothing new; it happens all the time, though usually with smaller
companies. It's quite illegal, of course.

