Why isn't anyone talking about how the 2002 United Airlines Bankruptcy article got into the "Most Popular Stories" bin in the first place? Couldn't someone easily have "put it there" by emailing it to themselves over and over again, or by linking to it in some cheesy SEO ploy?
How easy would it be to manipulate the market to your advantage in this way... all you do is note which newspapers don't include dates on their bylines (bad, bad Sentinel! the fault lies with you not Google!) and you are off to the races.
The SEC should be checking into who profited from this massive sell-off, getting a warrant, and checking their web tracks. And newspapers should change the algorithms so that "most popular" stories are limited to current stories, and permanently date their news. Until that's fixed this is gonna be like taking candy from a baby.
By the way, this is a great occasion for trusted news sources like the New York Times to crow a little about the importance of professionally written, human-edited content. It's easy to pick up and propagate a false story - just look at Swift Boat Veterans, or this near miss from Larry Ellison. Just kidding about Larry but that's his style, isn't it?
actually if you read the washpost article, the coup de grace was delivered by a human being, who posted the article to Bloomberg's private information service for Wall Street traders without double checking. So everyone played a part in this: Google, Bloomberg for not having more stringent controls, and the poor sap who actually posted the story.
The fact that it took a human being to actually introduce the article to the realm of information trusted by traders makes it unlikely in my mind that this was deliberate on anybody's part. Just one of those things.
Posted by: anonymous | September 10, 2008 at 11:18 PM