Misplaced blame on Google for UAL stock fiasco?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:39:06 -0400

It was only a matter of time until Tribune Company started assigning blame after its 2002 story on a United Airlines bankruptcy filing resurfaced on Monday.

In a press release, the company claims that the story's reappearance was the result of:

"... the inability of Google’s automated search agent "Googlebot" to differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the websites of its newspapers."

The press release went on to say that Tribune had:

"identified problems with Googlebot months ago and asked Google to stop using Googlebot to crawl newspaper websites, including The Sun-Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale), for inclusion in Google News."

One can only assume that the media relations department didn't actually talk to the IT department before issuing the press release, because bots, including Google's, are fairly consistent in what they are able to gather for information. Malformed dates in RSS feeds are a common culprit in issues with articles resurfacing. Even beyond what was likely bad feed information on Tribune's side, no one needs to ask Google to stop crawling anything. Any site administrator with even an entry-level background knows to control search spiders with the robots.txt file on the server, so if Tribune Company really wanted Google to stop crawling the site, it would have taken no more than a few lines of code in a server file to get Google to stop.

It was obviously a combination of errors that resulted in such a huge issue for Tribune Company, but the company would be wise to dig into what happened and fix the problems rather than passing the blame to Google. If the problem really is Google, why has this not happened before?

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Misplaced blame on Google for UAL stock fiasco?