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Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B

Posted by kdawson on from the who-shall-watch-the-watchers dept.

cmd writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story." The article makes clear that Google's news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.

15 of 546 comments (clear)

  1. BEHOLD.... by Jaysyn · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... the power of the GOOG!!

    --
    There is a war going on for your mind.
    1. Re:BEHOLD.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      The story begins in the summer of 1995 when a Standford graduate student finds himself -- without a suitcase -- pacing back in forth in front of an empty United baggage carousel at 4 AM. ....

      That graduate student's name: Sergey Brin.

      And, now you know "the rest of the story".

      With apologies to Casey Kasem.

    2. Re:BEHOLD.... by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's an honor usually reserved for /.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    3. Re:BEHOLD.... by Thelasko · · Score: 5, Funny

      The article makes clear that Google's news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper.

      Hmmm... Quick! Everybody click this link!

      --
      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    4. Re:BEHOLD.... by NotmyNick · · Score: 3, Funny

      Please explain your Whoosh.

      It's an easy way to get free karma.

      Re:BEHOLD.... (Score:-1, Troll) x 2

      Yeesh! It doesn't seem to have worked.

      --
      Notmysig
  2. Next time... by Timothy+Brownawell · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...perhaps they'll be more careful about whose luggage they lose.

  3. This is too awesome by theverylastperson · · Score: 5, Funny

    I laughed so hard my coworkers made me go outside.

    I love Google.

    --
    ed duval the very last person
  4. big bad bot battle by CheeseTroll · · Score: 4, Funny

    So the NewsBots trick the TradeBots, and we humans are left on the sidelines, hoping that we don't get squished in the process.

    Sounds like a sad Transformers sequel.

    --
    A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
  5. Corrections by himself · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Google regrets the error." What, it always works for the New York Times!

  6. that'll teach you. by sammy+baby · · Score: 5, Funny

    "I'm sorry, Mr. Schmidt. Your flight has been delayed by two hours."

    "Son of a... do you people know who I am? Dammit, get Brin on the phone."

  7. I can see the GNews developer in his cubicle... by this+great+guy · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Oops."

  8. Evaporated wealth? by Sloppy · · Score: 4, Funny

    First of all, this is fucking hilarious. Anyone with "computers that robotically [sic] troll the Web for news stories and execute stock trades automatically" deserves to reap the consequences of turning their destiny over to a computer.

    Second, I doubt that any capitol was destroyed by this. Wealth didn't "evaporate," it merely moved from stupid people to smarter people.

    I only wish I were one of the smarter people, who bought some stock worth $12 for $3. I should write a program to watch for that sort of thing happening, and then automatically buy-- oh wait.

    --
    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  9. Re:Holy crap. by corbettw · · Score: 4, Funny

    An automated submission editor would notice that the same story had been posted previously, so it would take about two days before someone realized the bots were running the show.

    --
    God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
  10. Re:Holy crap. by Kent+Recal · · Score: 3, Funny

    I want to be your friend, how do I start?

  11. So what happens to all those people that ... by Skapare · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... bought UAL stock at just $3? Oh wait.

    --
    now we need to go OSS in diesel cars