The resurfacing of a six-year-old Tribune Co article, which caused a severe drop in share prices for United Airlines, is being blamed squarely on search engines by the publisher.

Tribune has said it asked Google to stop crawling its newspaper websites ‘months ago’.

The story came to light after a single user accessed the story on the Florida Sun Sentinel’s website at a period of low traffic, the publisher claimed.

This single user was enough to push the story to the top of the paper’s most viewed articles, where it subsequently came to the attention of Google’s crawlers.