Monday, September 15, 2008

Google doesn't even know its own power

In a recent article on Slashdot it was revealed that one of Google News' spider bots crawled an outdated story (from 2002) about United Airlines being on the brink of bankruptcy. It turns out that the article did not have a time stamp and thus Google's spider bot assumed "today" (why not?).

The story was published on Google News, which was then crawled by several other news spider bots and the story spread like wildfire.

Pretty soon, everyone heard of the "breaking news" that was actually from 2002. This news caused the United Airlines stock to plummet from $12 to $3. This was obviously not good times.

Eventually the cause of the disaster was discovered and the United Airlines stock rose back up to $9.62. But this still left a $300 million hole.

A $300 million hole and all Google can say is "Tough luck, Chuck."

No comments: