Tribune Co. is dodging the crossfire in the wake of United Airlines chaos, and is pointing the finger of blame at Google's search technology.

An old Chicago Tribune story archived in the Web site of the sibling South Florida Sun Sentinel detailing a six-year old United Airlines story about how it entered into Chapter 11 was mistakenly circulated as a "new" story, triggering a frantic sell-off of United Airlines stock that sent the share price crashing by more than 70%. The autopsy of who is to blame has now been rumbling on for days.

According to the Tribune, Google's automated search agent, Googlebot, cannot, "differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the websites of its newspapers."

The Tribune also claims that they warned Google "months ago" to stop "crawling" its site. However, a Google spokesperson in a statement said, "The claim that the Tribune Company asked Google to stop crawling its newspaper Web sites is untrue."

A user looking up stories about airline cancellation policies late on Saturday night accessed the article in question from the archives of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

At such a time of night, that single hit made the six-year-old article move to the "most viewed" list by default. 52 seconds later, Googlebot crawled the story.

The Tribune went on to say, "Google provided a link to the old story on Google News and dated it September 6, 2008. Google's dating the story on Google News made it appear current to Google News users."

Source: Editor & Publisher

See also:

US: United Airlines chaos caused by human error and automation
US: United Airlines stock plummets after old bankruptcy story re-surfaces