On September 9th, 2008, Google crawler bots did what they always do.  They crawled sites world wide looking for relevant information to index in its plethora of portals and sites that it operates.  But on this date, Google bots picked up one story that it wasn’t supposed to.  An archived story that happened to appear on the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s site, that a curious user happened to stumble upon at 1:30AM.  A time when the site has very low traffic, which happened to boost this specific article to the Sun’s “Popular Stories” section and then onto the “Most Viewed Articles” section on their front page.  That single visit in the early hours of Sunday morning caused all hell to break loose!  The article that was moved onto the first page was indeed an article from 2002 in which United Airlines (UAL) filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

There was another problem.  The article wasn’t dated, and appeared to Google bots as a valid breaking news story since it was posted to a new url!

At 1:37am, an automated Google bot crawled through the paper’s site for new stories and spotted the link.

Google says its program scanned the piece and, seeing there was no 2002 dateline, indexed the article for inclusion on its news pages.

Three minutes and two seconds later, Google News readers started viewing the story on the Sun Sentinel’s web site.

What ensued next was sheer madness.  A Florida investment firm spotted the news story on the site, and submitted it to Bloomberg financial information network.  A financial news network monitored constantly by investment managers and stock traders worldwide!

A Bloomberg News staffer found the bankruptcy story on the Sun Sentinel site and, at 11:07a.m., posted a headline about the bankruptcy.

Investors then dumped UAL stock at a huge rate, triggering panic and automatic stop losses.  The stock shedded more than 75% of its value and plunged from $12 per share to $3 per share until trading was halted.

Trading resumed later that day after the mess was sorted out and determined that a false bankruptsy news story was to blame.  Shares climbed back up to $11 from $3 later in the day, but there are many who are now looking at large losses due to this blunder.

The SEC is investigating, but who is to blame?  We are in an instant informational age and sometimes it can cause true anarchy.  A somewhat scary thought…

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, SEO . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.