Posted by chicagomedia.org on September 10, 2008 at 19:13:43:
Google, Tribune Co. at odds over spread of United story
A day after the recirculation online of an old newspaper story caused a temporary collapse in the price of United Airlines stock, Google and Tribune Co. offered sometimes conflicting versions of events while failing to pinpoint what started the bizarre occurrence.
Tribune Co. said the Google News search engine caused a spike in traffic by adding a Sept. 6, 2008, date to a 6-year-old story about United's bankruptcy on the Web site of the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Tribune Co. owns the Sun Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune.
Google, meanwhile, said its search engines played no role in prompting Internet users to suddenly begin clicking on the Sun Sentinel's Web site early Sunday morning Florida time.
The two sides agreed that the old article, stored in the Sun Sentinel's archives, received enough clicks in the wee hours Sunday to make it one of the Florida newspaper's most-viewed stories in the business section of the site. That occurred well before the Google News search engine steered any users to the newspaper's Web site, but neither side could explain why.
Whatever caused the spike in traffic, the result is quite clear. Once a headline for the story hit the Bloomberg news terminal early Monday morning, it prompted a hair-raising, 75 percent sell-off in United shares and a halt in trading.
A full trading day later, United shares still are down more than 10 percent. Only briefly Tuesday did the shares come close to the $12 level where they traded prior to all the confusion.
The two sides took differing views of whether Google or Tribune Co. ultimately set the chain of events in motion.
On Tuesday, Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said the episode began because the story did not have a date on it when the Google News search program came across it early Sunday morning.
"We indexed the story in Google News," Stricker said. As part of that process, the Google search program assigns a date to a story.
Tribune Co.'s spokesman, in turn, argued that the key event was when Google's "bot" put a Sept. 6, 2008, date on the story. That date made the story appear fresh when it was accessed through Google News, the spokesman said.
"After the story appeared on Google News, traffic went through the roof," said Gary Weitman, a spokesman for Tribune Co.
While it might take an Internet-age sleuth familiar with "bots," "scrapes," page views and URLs to get to the bottom of the dispute, one key conclusion emerged Tuesday: The initial spike in traffic was the starting point of a remarkable chain of events that ultimately led six-year-old news to appear, as if fresh, on the Bloomberg site early Monday.
After a researcher at a financial information service called Income Securities Advisors forwarded the story to a market information site operated by Bloomberg, a headline saying only "UAL Corp: United Airlines files for Ch. 11 to cut costs," went out on the Bloomberg News Service. That was enough to prompt investors nervous about the airline industry to trounce the shares of United and dump stock of other major airlines too.
After nearly two full days of investigation, neither Tribune nor Google seemed able to explain why the article, first published by the Chicago Tribune, suddenly popped up as a "most viewed" story on the Sun Sentinel Web site's business page early Sunday.
The Sun Sentinel and Chicago Tribune routinely carry each other's content.
The occurrence took place between 1:00:34 a.m. 1:36:03 a.m. Sunday Eastern time. A few seconds after that, a Google search program—dubbed a "bot"—visited the site, partly in response to the story appearing as "Popular Stories Business: Most Viewed" on the Sun Sentinel site.
Stored in the newspaper's archives, the story carried no time stamp. As a result, the Google bot followed its own programming instructions and put a date on the content—Sept. 6, 2008. The date was Saturday, not Sunday, because Google programs run on Pacific time, and it was still before midnight at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
Roughly three minutes later, at 1:39 a.m. Sunday in Florida, the first visitor arrived via the Google News search engine at the Sun Sentinel's Web site.
Traffic remained heavy enough all of Sunday to keep the story on the Sun Sentinel's "most viewed" list, where it sat Monday morning when an employee at the Florida investment information service forwarded it to Bloomberg.
After that, the sell-off began. United's stock plummeted, prompting Nasdaq to halt trading of its shares. Trading resumed more than an hour later Monday.
(trib)