Probe into how Google mix-up caused $1 billion run on United

This is a facinating article on how technology is not perfect and that automation can create un expected consequences.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4742147.ece

These are the key paragraphs to what caused the problem for United Airlines, Tribune Publishing, a Florida investment firm, and Google and their Googlebots.

• The comedy of errors began with just one reader who went to the South Florida Sun Sentinel?s website and viewed a 2002 article on United Airlines? bankruptcy.
• That single visit in the early hours of Sunday morning, a period of low traffic, apparently bumped it into a "Popular Stories" in the business section.
• At 1:37am, an electronic Google program swept through the paper?s website for new stories and spotted the link.
• Google says its program scanned the piece and, seeing there was no 2002 dateline, indexed the article for inclusion on its news pages.
• Three minutes and two seconds later, Google News readers started viewing the story on the Sun Sentinel?s Web site.
• Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said that the only date the automated Google News software found on the Sun Sentinel site was from early Sunday eastern time.
• It appears that no one who passed this story along actually bothered to read the story itself,? he said.
• The page also fooled Bloomberg. Bloomberg News staffers posted headlines noting first the UAL share price drop, and then, at 11:06 a.m. EDT, a bankruptcy denial from United.
• A different Bloomberg News staffer working the story found the bankruptcy story on the Sun Sentinel site and, at 11:07a.m., posted a headline about the bankruptcy.

As a result of this technological comedy of errors, United's stock dropped from $12 per share down to $3. I had heard it reported that it had dropped to less than $1 at one point.