Turns out that UAL, parent company of United Airlines, is not going bankrupt. But shareholders found out only after shares dropped $3.50 on rumors.

What fed the rumor?

Google News, whose web crawler found an old, undated article from 2002 when UAL did file for bankruptcy. Since the article was undated (it has since been sourced and dated), it pushed the article out as new.

After Nasdaq investigated, the truth came out.

But not until after people lost money.

With a current client, we saw some news that should have been posted on Yahoo! but didn’t make it. No one lost money on the glitch, but it shows one thing that we sometimes forget.

Google and Yahoo! are great, but they are far from perfect.

Check out “A Mistaken News Report Hurts United” and “United Airlines Issues Statement.”