Is Google/GoogleBot responsible?

[SearchBliss]

It's amazing to me that GoogleBot can pull an old article as breaking news and create enough panick to damage a big company.

In a statement, Tribune said a 2002 story about United Airlines' bankruptcy was unearthed over the past weekend due to, "The inability of Google's automated search agent 'Googlebot' to differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the Web sites of its newspapers."
Tribune said that for that reason it had asked Google "months ago" to stop using its Googlebot to crawl newspaper Web sites, including the online version of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., based Sun Sentinel, where the UAL story was retrieved. Wide distribution of the outdated story led to a 70% plunge in the share price of United Airlines' parent company UAL on Monday.

[ssandecki]

I heard about this on the Radio yesterday, I don't think that company will be in buisness much longer. ;)

[vansterdam]

ssandecki do you mean UAL or Google? :)

Google is responsible for this. They cannot leave everything up to automated bots when it can clearly damage companies like this. It is this kind of sloppiness that could lead to the downfall of Google. Just because they are the most popular search engine, it doesn't mean they are free to do as they please.

[irunbackwards]

Tribune can just use their robots.txt to noindex for Googlebot if they want.

It's their fault, not Googles.

[kingofsanda]

This is horrible United Airlines probably lost millions of dollars because of this.

[enquiries0009]

this is very sad to united airlines. I think they lost many sales by listening this news.