Gawker: valleywag, united airlines

United Airlines news glitch fallout continues, with Google caught in a lie

Jackson West — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 04:00:00 EDT

Newspaper publisher Tribune is now saying that timing was what put a link to a four-year old United Airlines bankruptcy story on the website of one of its papers. From there, it was indexed by Google and made its way onto the Bloomberg business wire, triggering a partially automated market selloff which crashed United's stock price in only a few minutes. During a slow news period, a single visitor dropped by the Web site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and clicked once on a link to the old story. This activity was enough to triggger its inclusion on the website's list of the day's most popular stories. The Googlebot, Google's Web indexer, dropped by minutes later and added the story to Google News. Tribune is saying that they've asked the Googlebot to stop crawling the company's online publications, which Google denies — maybe Google should check its new newspaper archives.

Because last year, Tribune CEO Sam Zell asked Google to quit indexing and displaying headlines or pay up. How should Google have responded? By telling the IT guys at the Sun-Sentinel to edit the robots.txt file on the server that would presumably stop the Googlebot in its tracks. (Photo by AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)

How Robots Destroyed United Airlines

Ryan Tate — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:23:45 EDT

Yesterday the stock market destruction of United Airlines looked like just another case of bumbling by the Bloomberg news wire. That still appears to be very much correct, but new details tell a larger and more sinister story — a conspiracy of robots to nuke United Airlines by duping one or two humans into acting as pawns. The robot cabal involves aggressive, autonomous bots at Google, Tribune Company and on Wall Street which, despite extensive safeguards, turned swiftly against the wishes of their creators. The whole thing was triggered by some seemingly innocent Google searches and only God knows who it will kill next!

On Monday, travelers Googling for information on airline delays amid bad East Coast weather may have flocked to an old Chicago Tribune article about United Airlines' 2002 bankruptcy, hosted on the website of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Noticing all the incoming traffic, robots running the Sun-Sentinel site added the article to a list of most popular stories.

The aggressive journo-cyclons at Google News were watching that list, and inferred that the United Airlines article must be brand new if it was posted there. It didn't help that the human "editors" of the Sun-Sentinel website hadn't bothered to put a date stamp on the article to indicate how old it was.

Some different robots at Google then spammed this story out to anyone with a "UAL" news alert.

An unwitting human at Income Securities Advisors Inc. then stumbled upon the old article but thought it was new, because the timestamp attached to it in a Google News search indicated as much. The human posted a link to the article on an Income Securities section of Bloomberg.

Noticing the link, a human at Bloomberg News then published an incorrect headline to Bloomberg's own wire, the newswire confirmed today. (Yesterday it wasn't clear if this was the case — the Times correctly implied it was, the Wall Street Journal incorrectly said Bloomberg had merely hosted the Income Security report.)

The robots then seized back control of events! Automatic stock-trading systems helped push down the price of UAL amid panicked selling triggered by the Bloomberg report. The stock plummeted to $3 from $12.50 before some good robots finally halted trading.

The bottom line: Bloomberg news chief Matthew Winkler should be ashamed not only of the recent screwups by his journalists, but also because he was so wrong in his famous tirade line, "the enemy... is not the computer... it's the human!"

The enemy very much appears to be The Computer, Matt!

[WSJ, Bloomberg]

Google News glitch helps cause United stock selloff

Jackson West — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:00:00 EDT

Shares of United plummeted 75 percent on the Nasdaq exchange today before trading was manually halted. All of this because of a chain of events that started when a link to an old story from 2002 on the air carrier's bankruptcy appeared as a link on the website of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, was picked up by Google News, got written up by a newsletter produced by Income Securities Advisor, which in turn was distributed on the Bloomberg wire. Google is blaming the newspaper, while the newspaper is blaming Google. Bloomberg has washed its hands of the affair, blaming the content provider. And algorithm worshippers can all point to the puny human who didn't read the dateline. But that wasn't the real bug in the meatware.

It really boiled down to a bunch of people believing something they read on the Internet. In other words, Google and Bloomberg are seen as trusted sources. Google sells itself as more trustworthy because there are no editorial decisions made by humans on the news site — when of course, like Bloomberg's syndication practices, it's just that much cheaper to maintain. What neither of them have solved is the entire problem with the mechanization of information distribution: Garbage in, garbage out.