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United Airline's Stock Falls On Old Bankruptcy Story

Posted by samzenpus on from the check-the-date dept.

A six-year-old Chicago Tribune story about United's 2002 bankruptcy filing, was picked up from a Google search by an investment newsletter on Monday morning, triggering a massive sell-off of United shares until trading was stopped. The stock fell as low as $3 before finally bouncing back to $12.30. Attorneys on both sides have started investigations and the incident has caught the attention of securities officials. I wonder what the market is going to do when they learn that Germany has invaded the Sudetenland.

5 comments

  1. Talk about Jumping the Gun by Jesterace · · Score: 1

    Chaos!

  2. Professionals use validate their data. by ArieKremen · · Score: 1

    Either they skimped on the validation or used www.cuil.com

    --
    -- Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui
  3. More "old" stories by bee-17 · · Score: 1
    Consider this:
    • At least one other "old" news story made it to Google News yesterday. At about 7AM PDT on Sept 8, 2008, the headlining link for the RealNetworks DVD ripping story was to a 3-year old PCWorld article entitled DVD Ripping Flourishes. That old article had a correctly dated byline and appears to have been scooped up by Google at about the same time as the United Airlines Bankruptcy article (10:30pm PDT the night before).
    • Also on Sep 8, Google news introduced a new feature that returns old archived news stories to be returned in news searches. Is that a coincidence or what?

    Google's official answer on the subject avoids any sort of culpability. Did anyone else come across new "old" news on Monday Sep 8 on Google News?

  4. I've seen it w Java related news in Google News... by onitzuka · · Score: 1
    ... I've seen it with Java related news in Google News!!!... It has the same characteristics as the United Airlines situation. On September 4, in Google News, I saw the headline Kodak sues Sun over Java when the story was listed as only about an hour old! But when I went to check the real story it was really written back in 2002!!! =-O It's still there in Google News! Here's what you see there:

    Kodak sues Sun over Java
    Computerworld, MA - Sep 4, 2008
    Kodak has worked with Sun on several aspects of Java. It was one of six developers to work with the company in the creation of the Java Advanced Imaging ...

    And here is what you see in the Computerworld article:

    Kodak sues Sun over Java
    Martyn William, IDG News Service
    February 13, 2002 (IDG News Service) -- Eastman Kodak Co. has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Sun Microsystems Inc. over its Java programming technology, Sun said late yesterday.....

    Computerworld's web server throws out these response headers:

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:42:11 GMT
    Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) Resin/3.0.18 PHP/4.3.11 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.8a
    Content-Language: en
    Connection: close
    Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8

    I've seen these kind of things related to Java news for a few months.
    Each time I saw it, I wondered what might be behind it.
    SEO manipulating news rankings?

  5. obviously by nimbius · · Score: 1

    this stock sell was definitely the work of the Bolsheviks. why, have you heard what theyve been putting out on the Edison wax recording machine? its simply appalling! I've a mind to give old teddy a call straight away!

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.