I’ve been watching a fascinating story unfold in the US this week charting how a mixup on Google sent the share price of United Airlines plummeting by a massive 76 per cent. The event triggered an emergency halt in trading earlier this week as automated trading systems began a mass sell-off of United Airlines stock.

It all came about after a nearly six-year-old story detailing the airline’s bankruptcy filing in 2002 on the Sun Sentinel’s web site found its way back into Google’s news cycle which in turn was picked up by Bloomberg and the rest, as they say, is history. The Tribune Company, which owns the Sun Sentinel and other US newspapers has since removed the offending article from its archives.

I read the story before it was removed and despite it being clearly dated from 2002, and was clearly related to events in 2002 it still managed to wipe $1bn of the value off the airline in a matter of minutes.

Above all this shows just how important Google has become in the communications landscape today, and its no longer enough to simply assume that as long as your profile in the traditional media is good, that you can ignore what’s happening online, and in particular what Google thinks of you.

The United Airlines example will not be the last, and for people in the communications industry arguing over the technicality of Google’s algorithms that contributed to this, and how the story got republished is missing the point in a big way. What Google thinks of your brand, and how it is represented has a massive impact on your bottom line, so it’s about time you did something about it. Just ask United.

Google endured a second straight month of poor growth in paid search clicks, and that has brought out the usual scaremongers (the same that were predicting the end of social networks earlier this year when traffic growth plateaued) are saying it’s bad news for the market and showing that fears of a recession have truly hit online revenues.

Lets take a look at the facts:

1. The actual figures from Comscore show a 3% year-on-year rise during February in paid search clicks. The slowdown comes after Google began implementing a new system to cut down accidental clicks on paid search listings

2. Google’s move to stamp out irrelevant clicks is good news for the long term as it will increase the relevance of paid search and make it an even more efficient format.

So is the (non)recession having an impact? Well, traditionally in a time of recession marketing spend gets cut back to tried and tested methods that deliver strong and measurable ROI, such as direct marketing. Search marketing falls into that same category and certainly many of the people I’ve spoken to in the first quarter of this year can see certain aspects of their budgets being cut if times get tighter, but search isn’t one of them.

But beyond what Google has done, and all the scaremongering, there are still some changes afoot. Paid search costs continue to inflate and speaking to some search marketing firms, they are beginning to find – and some scared to find – that clients are looking more seriously at natural search, and increasing their investment in search engine optimization.

There is an ongoing threat to the paid search market – not to its existence, but to the way it’s used – there has for some time been a growing school of thought that natural search delivers better quality leads to your site and Google’s latest moves can be seen, in part at least to be a clear attempt to arrest that movement and safeguard the quality of clicks on paid search. The short-term blip is nothing to worry about – a blip is all it is – and if there is a recession, it’s not search that should be worried about budgets.