When Google got it wrong
Monday, September 15th, 2008 by Jon Clements 
This - in my humble opinion - is genuinely terrifying.
Apparently Google algorithms picked up a story about US airline, United Airlines, filing for bankruptcy. Result? The word spread like a bush fire through online news sites and the airline’s share price plummeted before someone at NASDAQ realised something was wrong.
In fact the story was an old one, from 2002, when the airline did have issues. But nobody had checked the story’s date before posting the story, causing millions of shares to be sold.
Google hasn’t merely been adopted as a verb in our language, it’s also become the de facto route for fact checking. But the United Airlines example shows what happens when computer goes bonkers.
Jeffrey Stibel at Harvard Business Review compares it to the panic that gripped American when Orson Welles did his famous Martian landing radio broadcasts. But with the Internet, the speed and reach of information changing hands is counted in seconds - and the effects speak for themselves.
