Tribune blames Google for confusion over old UA report

11 September 2008

Tribune Company, the publisher of Chicago Tribune, has blamed Google  for the 2002 United Airlines bankruptcy report in the paper resurfacing on the internet over the weekend, saying its automated search agent "Googlebot" could not differentiate between "breaking news" and "frequently viewed" stories on the websites of its newspapers.

The publisher said it had identified problems with Googlebot months ago and asked Google to stop using Googlebot to crawl newspaper websites, including The Sun Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale), for inclusion in Google News. Despite this request, Google continued using Googlebot to crawl The Sun Sentinel's website.

"Despite the company's earlier request and the confusion caused by Googlebot and Google News earlier this week, we believe that Googlebot continues to misclassify stories," the publisher said in a statement.

Tribune also released a summary of the sequence of events started by Googlebot's crawling The Sun Sentinel's website in the late-evening and early- morning hours of 6 September and 7 September, which says:

"The article, headlined "United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy," was originally published in the Chicago Tribune in 2002, and appeared on the newspaper's website (See: Six-year old bankruptcy news sends UA plummeting). It then became part of the online database of Tribune's newspapers. Our records indicate that the Googlebot crawled this story as recently as September 2 and September 3 and apparently treated it as old news.

"On 7 September  2008 at 1:00:34 ET, (Sept. 6, 2008, 10:00:34 PT) our records indicate that the article received a single visit. Given the fact that it was the middle of the night, traffic to the business section of the Sun Sentinel site was very low at the time. We believe that this single visit resulted in a link to the old article being created on a dynamic portion of the Sun Sentinel's business section under a tab called "Popular Stories Business: Most Viewed."