Bone Thug Bug
07-10-2008, 02:17 PM
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/07/swastika-tops-g.html Swastika tops Google's search list, then disappears This morning, the swastika character rose to the top of Google's Hot Trends list, which could mean, as we've speculated before, that thousands of people were searching for the symbol simultaneously. Perhaps even more oddly, the swastika mysteriously disappeared from the trends list a few hours later -- almost certainly the result of some human decision at Google, since the No. 1 term rarely vanishes from the list so quickly (especially after Drudge links to it). Various theories have been circulated about the provenance of the swastika on Google. The first, from a comments thread on Blogoscoped, was that someone on the underground message board 4Chan (the same net location that helped incubate the anti-Scientology group Anonymous) had posted the HTML code for the swastika in the morning, after which "thousand of people googled it." I'm not exactly sure why 4Chan members would've been Googling the character itself, unless it was some kind of subversive statement, but either way, the Blogoscoped commenter said the 4Chan post has now been removed. Another theory has to do with the symbol's original meaning (Wikipedia says the Sanskrit noun "svastika" means "meaning any lucky or auspicious object." Dan at tdaxp points out that if you actually search the character, you get a list of results in Chinese: "A little thought," he writes, "reveals why. The swastika is a traditional Chinese good-luck character, the Olympics are coming up, and good luck is on the Chinese mind." Dan points to the translation of the Chinese Wikipedia page on 'Wan.'Also seems a bit fishy -- thousands of Chinese are Googling the Swastika because it means good luck?I contacted Google for a comment on the disappearance, I'll post when I get a reply. I know displaying the Swastika is illegal in Germany, but I didn't think it was illegal on the Internet. Taking it down doesn't help anything: If a lot of people are searching it, there are a lot of other people that probably want to know why.</p>