davidsyes's Journal: Tribune, Google trade blame in United Airlines stock fiasco

Update on United Airlines Story
http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/update-on-united-airlines-story.html

"Aggregators like Google News were today the subject of news - this time pertaining to a 2002 story regarding United Airlines. For those of you who are interested in the nuts and bolts of why this was indexed by Google News, here are the details:

On Saturday, September 6th at 10:36PM Pacific, the Google crawler discovered a new link on the Florida Sun-Sentinel website in a section of the most viewed stories labeled "Popular Stories: Business." The link appeared in that section sometime after Googlebot's last crawl at 10:17PM; because the crawler saw this new link appear, it followed it to an article titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy.""

More at:

Google crawler blamed for UAL stock dive
http://www.silobreaker.com/DocumentReader.aspx?Item=5_900776456

Tribune, Google trade blame in United Airlines stock fiasco
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-moneyblog9-2008sep09,0,1609687.story

The scary thing is that anyone skilled enough can plant stories to short stock. However, today's United losses, while at a 75% dive, were mostly paper losses, and the dive was corrected almost to the pre-dive levels.

Not unexpected then perhaps?

[Shadow Wrought]

Untied has been bleeding money for years. Them declaring bankruptcy issues again wouldn't be as surprising as if IBM or Microsoft did so out of the blue. So I'm guessing if it was not unexpected that people would do less diligent researching, whereas if it was a complete surprise people would look into it.

As always of course the best part of any airline having stock issues is the inadvertant puns about stocks nose-diving, crashing, and burning;-)