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Computers Blamed For Article That Sunk United Stock

As Tribune Co. and Google debated over who caused the glitch that cratered UAL's stock Monday, blame spread to the computers that troll the Web for news and automatically execute stock trades.

An old news article about UAL's 2002 bankruptcy resurfaced Monday as a current story on Google's widely read news service. It prompted UAL's stock to take a nosedive before United's parent company could issue a denial.

Circumstances of the glitch remain murky. For some reason the old story--without a date--suddenly appeared on a list of "most popular business stories" on the Web site of the Trib's South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper over the weekend. Google's crawler found it there and treated it as a recent story, which it posted and was picked up by other news outlets. The rest is history.

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