You all know now 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 rapidly 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 yesterday) 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.

This story highlights the unhealthy importance of Google on world economy. Google's action (intentional or not) can be directly attributed to over 300 million dollar loss by United and a loss of face. Should Google be sued for this mistake? Full article (331 words) »