Google Old News cause Big Trouble !!

17 September, 2008 (14:35) | Google | By: AhTim

A big big mistake! Google News crawled an old news “Bankruptcy of United Airlines” in year 2002 as today’s news and cause serious stock market evaporate.

This old story was first hit its popularity in South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. Google news bot then pick it up and show it as news result for the keywords of “2008 bankruptcy”. After that, the ISA editor write a report on the story and submitted as news flash on Bloomberg!

The Google Bot Effects

United Airlines clarified and brought down the news one minute after published. Due to Google search engine effect, the bankruptcy story become hot news in Google search results. Without waiting more, investors throw shares in their account. Within 5 minutes, the UAL (United Airline) stock drop 33%. In 30 minutes, the share price drop from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars!! This is ridiculous.

Anyway, the company has clarified the truth 10 minutes after news published. The share price went up again to $11 after stock open. This is like playing millionaire computer games in computer huh? This is what we call Real Life Disaster from Internet.

My two cents

I’m thinking if I saw bankruptcy news of bank in Malaysia, will I quickly withdraw my saving or sell off stocks? What will you do?

From the incident we saw how people rely on Internet News, esspecially Google news. Will you trust internet news without clarified from other parties? Do you think in future, Google news bot is going to control worldwide finance?

[via slashdot and SinChew]