"Tribune said it asked Google to stop using Google to crawl newspaper Web sites but Google continued to do so."<p>Wait, really? I find this disingenuous to say the least, coming from the same Tribune company that created a skunkworks project six months ago explicitly tasked with co-opting and "gaming" online communities of note (Digg, twitter, flickr and others.) They're desperate for pageviews. How many readers would they lose if the Googlebot actually kept out?<p>And can't they just block it out with a robot.txt file?
So, the Tribune put an <i>undated</i> story on their front page under "top stories" and blames Google for not figuring out that the story was old? How would a human even realize that, let alone a bot?<p>If accounts of the story are accurate then the <i>only</i> party that screwed up was the Tribune by a) using an absurdly naive "top story" algorithm and b) not dating their stories (pathetic for any site in this age, but a <i>newspaper</i>!?)
It's incredible that this story had such a dramatic effect on UAL. This suggests a strategy:<p><pre><code> 1. Plant bad stories about large companies.
2. Buy put options and wait.
3. Profit!</code></pre>