Comments on: Google’s Googlebot Causes United Airlines Stock to Plummet Says Tribune Company

By: Game Economy

Game Economy — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:17:29 +0000

My first reaction to this was of course, a simple robots.txt file, but clearly something was going wrong here. What’s even more frightening is that a major media company such as tribune wasn’t able to prevent this from happening in the first place?

By: Rachelloury

Rachelloury — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 06:05:53 +0000

Anyway it was interesting that me as a stock market trader took a nice edge because of this glitch, I had a day before shorted the stock, and even though I didnt rode it to the end I did make double what I was supposed to do thanks to this.

By: Chicago Event Production

Chicago Event Production — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:47:49 +0000

Maybe the publishers of the information should verify the information before they publish them! When did news reporting turn information turn into picking up stories off of the internet anyway?

By: Gustav

Gustav — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:47:35 +0000

It is kind of stupid to ask google to stop crawling and Google itself have given all of us enough tools to stop the crawling.

Anyways it was interesting that me as a stock market trader took a nice edge because of this glitch, I had a day before shorted the stock, and even though I didnt rode it to the end I did make double what I was supposed to do thanks to this.

Gustav

By: Glendale Attorney

Glendale Attorney — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:58:14 +0000

The same problem occurs when a company has multiple local listings. Somehow they end up all getting mixed in with info that doesn’t necessarily match the local results. The Tribune should have certain safeguards in place so that these things won’t repeat itself. Thats interesting though how the Googlebot would craw an old story and then have this mistake compounded by putting a current date on the story.

By: Michael D

Michael D — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:24:38 +0000

When I saw this I wondered how many other news articles regularly get indexed that are not new content. I don’t remember any specific items but I’m fairly sure I’ve come across some older (longer than 30 days) posts when sifting through Google news posts. Time to start making screen shots if it happens again.

By: Erase Bad Credit

Erase Bad Credit — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:27:43 +0000

To be totally honest, I don’t think that Google is as infallible as everyone thinks. Maybe there’s something fishy going on with the Tribune and they weren’t using their robots.txt or webmaster tools correctly but from the article, they seemed to be monitoring the situation closely to know what was going on…

Look, we all know that Google says one thing and does another regarding their policies. Just saying…

By: Dinghus

Dinghus — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:47:17 +0000

They actually have a very valid point, however, Googlebot needs to be able to tell how old an article is before doing anything with it. This is a flaw in Googlebot. However, the newspaper’s own system of deciding what is “hot” obviously failed also. 1 person clicked on the link to the article and that made it “hot” because it was a slow time of day? That is a problem. Obviously.

If the stock really did drop due to this story going out, then it shows the power Google and other news aggregators have over us. A false story will spread just as fast as a true story and can have a heavy impact on the market.

By: Singapore SEO

Singapore SEO — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:10:08 +0000

As mentioned above, Google has offered webmasters the option to prevent crawling of certain areas within the site by including a code snippet in its robot txt file. It is in the best interest of Tribune to find out or implement robot txt to prevent the crawling of certain information within its site. They can even state in their meta tags the expiration of the page and instruct bots not to crawl certain pages once expired. These are basic onpage optimization that should be done by the webmaster. – Rif Chia

By: Sleep Aid

Sleep Aid — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:58:07 +0000

I think this was just a very clever way for the Tribune to get some free publicity by attacking Google and making a lot of the news agencies pick up on the story. You know what they say, any publicity is good publicity.