Bad "most popular" algorithm led to United Airline's stock collapsing.

brandnewlow · on Sept 11, 2008

"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 · on Sept 11, 2008

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.

extension · on Sept 11, 2008

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 · on Sept 11, 2008

Here's the Sun-Sentinel approved story: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/sfl-flzunited0909sbsep0...

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 · on Sept 11, 2008

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 · on Sept 11, 2008

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

danteembermage · on Sept 11, 2008

In the trade this is known as "Short and distort" You can probably guess how "pump and dump" works now right?