Rise and fall of the Googled swastika
The swastika, the symbol of Nazism, still provokes strong feelings of fear and anger. So it was something of a shock when late this week the swastika suddenly hit the top of Google's Hot Trends page, which tracks the 100 terms that U.S. Google users are searching for most furiously. It hovered there for several hours, then disappeared from the list.
It became the Web mystery du jour: How did the swastika get there, why did it become so popular and who, or what, caused its demise? The search for the answer sent Google watchers on a chase that led through China, Tel Aviv, London and finally back to the secretive company's Silicon Valley headquarters, from which Google issued a rare apology.
Often, the terms on the list reflect a burst of interest in some news- or commerce-related event, and readers can use the list as a kind of cultural heat map -- for example, when the iPhone 3G went on sale Friday. Yet somehow the swastika had ascended to the top of the list without a single swastika-related news story or blog post.
Various theories made their way around. A blogger named Dan at a site called tdaxp noticed the strange phenomenon. "The swastika is a traditional Chinese good-luck character, the Olympics are coming up, and good luck is on the Chinese mind."
Also, the Chinese press had just reported on a scandal: Owners of a commercial complex in Xian had adorned their building with a mural of "a long, black train with a Nazi-inspired swastika" on the locomotive. The Xinhua news agency quoted a bystander: "If it's creative, the businessmen were neglecting people's feelings. If it was unintentional, then the businessmen don't understand the history of that period." Still, even if everyone in China had been searching for the swastika symbol they saw in this story, it would not have registered on Google Trends.
But these theories were quickly discounted: Google's Hot Trends samples only from U.S. searches.
Meanwhile, there was the other, perhaps thornier, issue of why the swastika disappeared from Google's Hot Trends list. Generally, when a term is searched by enough people to shoot it to the top spot, it takes hours for it to fade from the list. An initial inquiry to Google on what may have happened to the swastika met with a cagey reply. Instead of saying why it vanished, Google suggested its own theory of why it had appeared.
