If you have every questioned the power of Google, consider this: United Airlines lost 76% of its value the other day due to the supposed re-posting (or careless reading) of a six-year-old Chicago Tribune article about the firm's 2002 bankruptcy filing.


According to the New York Times, a reporter for Income Securities Advisors in Miami found the article on The Sun-Sentinel, and then posted it to Bloomberg news, inciting a false bankruptcy report. From the NYTimes:

Richard Lehmann, the founder of Income Securities, said the company's reporter discovered the article during a routine search on Google for information about bankruptcy filings in 2008. A link to the old Chicago Tribune article appeared as the first search item, bearing a current date, not its original date, Mr. Lehmann said. When the reporter clicked on the link, it navigated to the United Airlines article on the front page of the Sun-Sentinel Web site, next to a radar map showing the location of Hurricane Ike, Mr. Lehmann said.

"A Chicago Tribune story written in December 2002 regarding the United Airlines bankruptcy filing that year was apparently picked up by an investment advisory and research firm and republished as though it was current," said a Tribune Company statement released Monday.
"The story was located in the archive section of the website of the Sun Sentinel in South Florida. The story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002."

Joseph Schwerdt, deputy managing editor-interactive for the Sun-Sentinel, said internal tracking records show that no one had opened the original story file since 2003. The story would have been available via a search on the site, but no one outside the paper should have had access to the story file, Schwerdt said.

• Scenario A: The Tribune Company, or perhaps the Sun-Sentinel, has bad search engine optimization practices, posting today's date on old articles. This would be completely unacceptable for a publisher of such size.


• Scenario B: The searcher did not realize that the default for Google News results is relevance, and not date. The searcher did not read through the article carefully, nor noted the quotes attributed to 2002. The searcher then reposted the article as current. This would be also be completely unacceptable.