Tribune Co. has blamed Google for treating an outdated story about United Airlines 2002 bankruptcy filing as current news, causing the recent crash in UAL stock prices. After a single web hit to the story, the bankruptcy rumor exploded across the web and, spurred by automated trading, UAL lost nearly 75% of it’s stock value in 15 minutes. Tribune says that it had spotted problems with the “Googlebot” technology months earlier and had asked Google to stop using it to crawl for stories on its website.
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